


Journey Red

by indiachick



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Case Fic, City Noiresque, Demon Blood and Stuff, Gen, Hallucinations, Hallucinogens, Mind Games, New York City, Search the Web comes to the rescue, Substance Abuse, Technological Kink
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-04
Updated: 2015-02-04
Packaged: 2018-03-10 13:21:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 22,100
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3291824
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/indiachick/pseuds/indiachick
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Every case starts with a body.</i>
</p><p> </p><p>Sam and Dean hit New York to investigate a rash of suicides. It's stormy, their sources are questionable, and they're working out of a hovel. But the deeper they get into the case, the more tangled they get. And then the stakes get dangerous, and deeply personal.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Journey Red

**Author's Note:**

> Written for spn_reversebang, for gorgeous art by a_starfish. Check out her art masterpost [HERE.](http://a-starfish.livejournal.com/498069.html)
> 
> I tried writing a very imagery driven, city-esque story for this prompt, and picked NYC as the setting. I've only been to New York through the pages of many books, so any glaring errors spotted by residents, please to be forgave and forgotten. :)

****

 

**Part** **One**

**SAM**

Every case starts with a body.

Usually dead, usually clean. Pale under the lights of a morgue, sterile and leached off color. Ice-cold to the touch, but with the slight give of skin that’s strangely common to dead things.

 In the unforgiving light, the skin will look powdery, the eyelids bruised. The shadows that climb on the walls will give a garish offset to the body’s dips, curves and crannies, as if they are holes bored in skin for something else to crawl through. The lips are the most intriguing though, in the way they purple, as if bursting to shriek out the secrets of the afterlife.

They’ll all tell you that the peaceful dead look like they’re sleeping—writers and poets and useless C-grade movie directors— but they’re lying. The dead are profligate in their storytelling. If your eye is experienced enough, you will see what the dead wants you to see, hear what the dead wants you to hear.

So, maybe, every case actually starts with a hunter standing over a body, trying to learn its secrets.

The libertine observer, feasting on morbid detail, taking whatever is given to him.

Sam has to sidestep whole rivers of blood to get to the mess but when he does, he feels nothing.

There’s no use pretending, not to himself. In the first few days since his return he’d wondered if he was just waiting, stranded at the edge of a levee close to breaking. Something will come along that’s just a tiny bit too much for his brain, and off his head will come like Humpty Dumpty.

But not yet.

For now, Sam feels nothing.

It’s new, that feeling. The Sam-of-before would have felt _something_ : momentary misery, maybe something too small to be sadness but just as hard and cold. Maybe even just plain old human sympathy—Sammy had plenty of that now, didn’t he? Poster-child for hugs and feels, that one, but now it’s nothing. He’s empty.

Sam looks down.

His fists curl and uncurl; his breath is a plume of white that spins dissolute in the air. The woman’s heart is gone but it’s strange, Sam thinks, it’s all so _strange_. There’s dark goo mixed with dark blood. It sticks to the bottom of Sam’s shoe and he tries to scuff it clean, and then he sees that the woman’s hand is too close to his foot, fingers open wide as a lily.

His breath hitches.

The city’s face is that of a devil sometimes, and Manhattan is its gaping dark mouth. From where he stands, Sam can see the skyscrapers rising like jagged teeth. Central Park is cold and quiet, the Reservoir black, the houses along Fifth Avenue lit in faded golden glow.  Over here there is no color, except for Samuel’s cigarette. Hephaestene, it burns bright in the dark and casts a sickly glow on his face. He looks unforgiving.

The night is black. The dead woman’s blood, too, is black.

Sam looks down at the dead woman and his thoughts jump an orbital, spins up and into a tangent on how the shower curtain back at the motel in Mott Street is the worst he’s ever seen. Sam looks down—she’s around thirty, white, gold around her neck and blood around her head snaking Medusa strands on flat grey asphalt—and a hole yawns in him till he thinks it’ll gobble him up, close its thick lips over the top of his head, simply nullify him like he’s a variable that didn’t fit the algorithm.

Sam looks down.

He coughs, wetly, around that _hole._ He can’t ignore it, it’s too big.  It’s where something used to be, though he doesn’t know what. He fills and fills this new hole in him with the smallest of details from places that aren’t this: textural memory, speech bubbles, the pitch and cadence of the Chinese woman who’d been shouting down below when the two of them rushed out in fed suits. He fills it with what Samuel was jabbering on about on their way here—something about Campbell kids, something about Sam’s brother. Fills it with the taste of the weird rare steak Samuel had gotten from the only place to remain open when they’d arrived in Chinatown yesterday (Strange, strange; Sam’s was sloppy and red in its wrapping of paper napkins, red like meat, red like blood; it was thick and rich in his hand and he’d asked, _are we also eating like werewolves now?_ And that was a thing too, that was a thing. Strange things happened this last year, so strange.)

There’s a trail of red ants down near the woman’s blood. In straight lines, like red chevron stripes. Sam fills up the hole with those too. Stuffs them in and feels their teeth in his chest; tiny sharp teeth. Sees them riddled in his blood and flesh. At the frayed edges of the hole in his chest.

No, his head.

 _God_ , in his head.  

Everything is in his head.

“Sam?”

“Yeah,” Sam says. It’s Blink-182 on the radio. Dean’s driving, and New York is shining through the windows with that cozy light it shines on only those that don’t live here. Wrecker’s lamps, thinks Sam, for the wrecked or those heading there.

It’s a crazy little thought.

And Sam’s crazy—he’s crazy. He’s unraveling at the seams. He’s the guy who fell (forever) and fucked his head up on hard (under) ground.

And if Dean looks at him with that expression that hovers in no man’s land between concern and constipation one more time, he’s also gonna be the guy that hurled in Dean Winchester’s car.

“You in there,” Dean says. Should be a question, but Dean’s tired of asking, Sam can tell. Dean’s let the question marks march away from him. Dean’s tired of Sam getting lost in his head, caught up in his thoughts like a fly in a meticulous spider-web.

 _Don’t scratch,_ Dean tells him, as he has been at every stoplight and zebra crossing.

Sam wishes he knew how.

The Impala whines on black ice, sobs to a stop at a red light. Her tires skid unwillingly. Her engine shrieks. She’s been doing that, these past few weeks. Pushed too hard, too fast—she needs her rest too. Or maybe she’s just had too much of it this last year.

“Sam.”

 “Sorry.”

If Sam looks out the window, the colors will bleed through his eyes and saturate his brain. Streetlights, tickers, contrails—once up high, brightest where they should be, but reflected again in buildings, the hoods of parked cars, the black rain water pooling on the gravel. Everything surface is becoming volume, shining and shining, so that they make, by infinite multiplication, that weird Droste effect of standing between two mirrors.

But Dean’s still looking at him expectantly.

“There was—,” starts Sam, “a werewolf case in Central Park. Dead woman, with a hole clean through her chest.”

Dean shrugs. His face blinks in and out of shadow, out of color. Letters and neon and floral advertising: Dean’s a Technicolor blob. “Isn’t that how werewolf kills usually look? What was different?”

“We-uh, Samuel and I, that is—we figured out that these were _ghost_ werewolves.”

Dean’s eyes go round. “Oh.”

“Yeah,” Sam says to the window.  “Ectoplasm and all. Serious fucked up shit.”

Dean’s fingers fiddle on the radio dial, changes the song. Static, static, and then a channel from somewhere here in New York: low flute music, or maybe harp. Classical, and it’s not very good at all, sounds a lot like someone having an asthma attack into the mouthpiece of something. Even Sam winces a little.

Dean says: “I didn’t know werewolves _could_ be ghosts. I mean, do they have souls? How do you become a ghost without a soul?”

Sam snorts. Look at them, he thinks; look at how they filter things. Monsters on one side, Winchesters on the other— after all these years and appearances to the contrary.

“Until last month, I didn’t know _I_ could live without a soul.”

Dean’s unfazed. “Yeah, some real meta stuff there. Very Nolan,” he says. He frowns. Sam watches closely, and it becomes a scowl. “Fuck.” Dean says, annoyed. Not at Sam, though, he can tell _that_ kind of annoyance from this.

Sam watches Dean’s fingers on the radio, turning the knob. All the way here. All the way there. The flute music persists, and Dean curses, slaps hard on the stereo player. Sam waits for the lights to blink or the flute to turn scratchy or something to fall onto their windshield—but this is nothing supernatural. Just loose wiring, a couple of dying sparks here or there. An hour of work for Dean, if he finds the time.

“Great. Fucking timing, just _great,_ ” Dean mumbles. “Hey, Sam. Anything here that’ll set you off?”

“Set me...off?”

“Like there.” Dean waves, as if that makes so much sense. “Like back at Bristol, with Spiderman—”

“Coz, Sammy, I don’t want you getting another blind test of Hell, man. So you gotta tell me.”

Ghostwerewolvesmight set him off, Sam thinks, though those are pretty hard to come by. Maybe rare steaks will set him off. Maybe red ants. Maybe the way Dean waits on him like Sam’s a grenade about to go off. Like Sam’s gonna drop the other shoe on him so fast, Dean won’t even have time to blink. Like Sam’s a lunatic, a basket-case, a flier trying to jump from the top of the Empire State Building on paper wings.

“New York’s fucking _huge_ , Dean,” Sam mutters. He presses his nose to the window and watches the towers of Manhattan sway in impossible fractals—tricks of light, maybe tricks of mind. “What’s to say I’ll even see the smallest thing to do with last time—?”

“Still.”

Sam thinks of shower curtains. Possibly nightmare inducing? _Yes,_ he thinks, especially if they come with Finding Nemo patterns. “Let’s just not stay in Mott Street this time, okay?”

Dean only grunts. Then he says, “Don’t scratch. You hear me, Sam?”

“Yeah, yeah. I hear you.”

 _Do not scratch,_ Sam thinks, in a voice that’s not his own. He pats his knee instead: once, twice, three times makes it a charm. _Do not scratch._ Pat, pat, ease that wrinkle.

The sky above is Netscape grey, dawn squeezing in through nooks and crannies. And Sam’s got a bad feeling about all this, subtle as rain on the river, building somewhere under his skin.

                                                                                                  ---                                                      

They’re here on suicides.

Jumpers, actually—rich, successful businesspeople found dead beneath empty elevator shafts and ruined stairwells in buildings that they should never have been in. Bloody, saddening ends, like the Grim Reaper has taken the form of a manic human-mower. Dean found them the case. There have been five victims already and the time lapse between two possibly related deaths is growing slimmer. Between the Tribeca one and the newest one in Worth Street, there’s barely been a week. The newest is the guy with the thickest wallet yet: fifty, reaping the harvests of a spectacularly well-performing start-up, married to an heiress. Home in the Adirondacks, girls around the world to play footsie with, his only son off in Wharton chasing an MBA.

Dying, by contrast, on a rubble-infused concrete floor littered with old needles and Trojan wrappers, in a known crack den just off Worth Street, his skull burst open like an over-ripe satsuma. Karmic, one could say. Sam just thinks, _poor fucker._

“True love, cancer, or something supernatural,” he mutters. He’s quoting; he doesn’t know what. Dust settles in the air around them with each step they take, and Sam sneezes, squints at the stark urban poetry of jutting RCC bars and broken pipes. “What killed this guy?”

“Forecasting,” Dean says, stepping under the NYPD yellow-tape. “Everyone’s just got NASDAQ blues.”

He walks to the chalk outline of the body and peers at it. Sam stops waving the EMF around, slapping at it to get it to at least light up a _little_.

Dean sighs. “Not gonna help, Sammy. Last similar case was, where, Tribeca? And Bowery before that. What, you think ghosts hop on cabs and chase vics around all over Manhattan?”

“Hmm,” Sam says. Maybe, yeah, Dean, maybe ghosts do that. He’s not discounting anything here. “What likes pushing people off buildings?”

Sam kneels by the outline, focusing on the dark patch on the ground where the dead guy’s blood has seeped in. The pattern has the chrysanthemum shape consistent with jumpers. Sam cranes his neck to evaluate the body’s trajectory, and finds a sickly sickle moon shining yellow through a narrow skylight. A shiver runs down his shoulder blades. It’s so high up. How would it feel to stand there? New York buzzing around you, cold sculpting clouds from your breath, the night all a tangle of dark and light…

 “This isn’t just _people,_ though,” says Dean. He frowns when Sam startles and looks up at him, his eyebrows stitching together. “Girl I talked to said Driscoll was a dickhead, but _rad_.”

It doesn’t compute. Sam blinks. “He’s like… a cool dickhead?”

“No, it’s Valley lingo, man, for whoever was messing around with, uh, what was it she said— _crawlers,_ yeah, in the ancient times. Like, before Google.  Which is, when Bill Gates was still in high school chowing down mystery meat,” Dean shrugs expansively. “Driscoll was a code monkey, some sorta genius. Pioneered some stuff—I don’t know, she said, deep wave, deep wire, something—”

“DeepWeb?”

Dean looks at him thoughtfully. “Yeah, yeah. Knew you’d know. Nerd.”

“I’m surprised you _don’t_ ,” Sam says. He smoothens the sheet of paper in his hand, trains his flashlight on the pictures from the Fifth Precinct again. Blurry from the Photocopy machine, but it really just looks like a suicide. The body too. Sam thinks he can tell if a body’s been pushed or if its owner chose to take the leap himself. That kind of thing leaves a mark.

Suddenly, he’s sure Driscoll just jumped. He could quote Harlequin and say _a broken heart killed him_ , but all Sam says is, “I don’t think there’s a case here, Dean.”

“Huh.” Dean doesn’t seem surprised.

“You wanna tell me exactly why you were so sure there was?”

Dean doesn’t. Sam sulks and prods a little more, wonders if there’s some Busty Asian Beauties conclave down at Chinatown that he hasn’t heard of, wonders if this is some other strange Dean-ism that his brother’s picked up while Sam was doing time down in the Biblical furnace. There’s been some of them, what, some non-Dean things that’s become Dean-things lately—like brooding, like knowing what the Dow Jones index is, like that time in the supermarket when Sam got introduced to fabric conditioner out of the blue. Looking at Dean is like looking through smudged glass. Where there aren’t other fingerprints on the surface, Sam sees his brother clearly.

Or maybe that’s true for both of them.

“Dean.”

“Maybe there’s something we’re missing.”

Sam crosses his arms. “Yeah, we are. We’re missing whatever it is that you didn’t tell me.”

“Oh, goddammit, Sam, I’m not hiding anything,” Dean says, shaking his head back and forth in exasperation, “You wanna hightail it outta here tonight? I’m totally fine with it. We could go after that, what was that you—”

Sam, tetchily: “The chupacabra in Jersey—”

“Yeah, that? Let’s do that, if you think there’s no case here, seriously—”

Sam shakes his head. “Not tonight. But we’re going tomorrow.”

“Fair enough, Sammy.” And Dean’s already walking. “We’ll grab some good-luck tamale from that Latino place first thing tomorrow, and get outta here. Okay?”

Sam stuffs the EMF in his pocket. “You’re really not going to tell me?”

Dean huffs, rolls his eyes. “You know what? It’s been a long fucking day. I’m wiped. All I care about right now is the dollar to burger conversion ratio.  I’m gonna grab a beer, get some grub, and crash.” And when Sam still just stares at him, dubiously, Dean rubs at his eyes, sighing, and it’s true: he _does_ look battered, frayed from a bout of flu he’s still working through. “Come on, Sam. Let’s call it a day, have a drink together. Sound good?”

It _does_ sound good, Sam has to admit. And Dean’s still sniffling from a cold he picked up last week. Sam owes him this, at least.

Dean grins at his silence. “Great! Let’s get the hell out of here.”

It’s raining when they finally make it to the Impala, water dripping off the tips of Sam’s hair and making him blink furiously. The car shines under stark streetlights, sleek and wet like a sea-creature. Dean swears, tries to stow a shower-cap on Sam that came from God-knows-where, and then the key is in the injection and off they go.

“Better take a look at that,” Sam says, meaning the radio, still spitting out classical. “Or we’re gonna be stuck tomorrow with Mozart here.”

“What, the music system?” mumbles Dean, “I’ll fix it.”

Everything is so bright. Sam settles in with his eyes half-mast, and with the world blurred like this, he can almost fool himself into thinking they’re streaming past stars.

\---

 

They can’t afford a motel, so Sam and Dean are staying in an old tenement building in Henry Street—top floor on number 84. They’re sharing with a friend of Bobby’s—this Trinidadian tough-guy with a single-digit employee number, who delivers pizza and some other things, and who’s currently off at the Adirondacks on some shady supply run. 84 Henry is five stories, all crumbling red brick and a tangled fire-escape right out of the movies. The hallway extends past wonky mailboxes, derelict and dark, graffiti sprouting from thick patinas of grime, fliers of massage parlors and ill-disguised brothels tacked to every surface with Scotch tape. Dean makes a show of ungluing Miss Yui from her ignominious place under a dripping pipe, peering at her globe-like Kama Sutra boobs with delight.

The stairway is dim and badly lit. Sam can hear cartoons through some doors, shouting through some others. The walls are thin like paper, doesn’t even filter the hisses of pressure-cookers going.

Climbing past the third floor, Sam’s taken aback by the pink-eyed stare of an albino boy staring intently through a crack in a door. The kid hisses, eyes rolling frighteningly in his head, and Sam doesn’t know what to do, so he smiles.

The kid asks him something. Foreign language. When Sam shakes his head, the door slams shut and there’s a wailing like something’s carving flesh from the kid’s bones. Dean barks “Sam!” when he goes to knock at the door.

 _Come on,_ Dean says. His eyes glitter in the dim light. _Come on, Sammy. Let’s go._

Sam feels a fluttering in his chest, strange premonition, something wicked this way comes. He’s extra careful going up the stairs after that, watches Dean’s feet too, expecting him to slip and slide and fall. Crack his head open like Driscoll back there. Blood and brains black in iron-modulated light.

Sam’s always thinking odd things, these days.

“Watch your step,” Dean says, so maybe he’s thinking it too.

The apartment they’re staying in has two rooms: a grey space with torn shades on the windows, couple of lumpy mattresses on the ground, a balcony overlooking a messy, culturally hodge-podged street and a tiny bathroom with a twisted showerhead. There’s also an out of shape dog-eared TV attached to some mad electronics to get it to sputter to life if you flick a switch. Sam can smell its brains cooking from halfway across the room.

It’s a new low, even for them.

Sam almost misses Mott Street.

“Hey Dean,” Sam calls out before he can stop himself. He’s lying on his mattress, staring at the ceiling. “What was it like for you?”

Dean turns, confused. “ _What?”_

“When you came back, and you were having nightmares.”

“You’re having nightmares.”

Dean’s focused scrutiny is a bit off-putting. “I’m…just. Tell me. Was it—”

“You’re not me. It’s not the same.”

Sam sighs. “And that’s not the answer to my question.”

Something in Dean’s face closes off. “I don’t want to answer that question. We haven’t answered that question in a long while, why start now?”

He turns back around, blocking Sam out. And then he says, “It’s bullshit, Sammy. It feels like crap, and that’s basically our life, and that sucks. Hell’s not much different.”

Okay, then.

The descent into sleep is helical and slow tonight, and whenever Sam goes under, he dreams strange dreams. Nothing new there: Sam’s been having nightmares for as long as he can remember, especially of late when it’s all been tales from the Hell front, but there’s something wrong about the quality of these. It’s like he’s underwater, and the smothering weight of layers above is pushing him down. He hears music, incredibly sad, and dreams of having burned the world down without getting that one chance to fix it. The fire is far and distant from under water, doesn’t touch him, and that’s terrible. He wakes with his heart pounding, fingers curling on thin sheets. His breath fogs—it’s cold. His fingers are cold; he pushes them with half a thought against his chest. He twists his head to look at a strip of light painting the top of Dean’s head silver, listens to Dean breathe with that cold-rattle he’s still fighting. Sam watches him with sudden strange affection, then closes his eyes and falls into another nightmare.

He wakes this time trying to pull his skin off, frantic fingers scrabbling at his arms, trying to get to his blood, his veins.

He lies there sipping air through his mouth, too loud and broken-up and exhausted.

When he’s calm enough, Sam sits with his knees drawn to his chest, and watches the shadow of the TV fight with the moonlight to stay alive. Then he smoothes his hair, tucks the edge of his sheet back under the mattress, positions his pillow in so many different angles with miniscule variations until he’s satisfied. And then he messes with the space between his feet for as long as he can stand, startling to a stop when Dean turns over in sleep and mumbles something.

Sam thinks, _going crazy._

There’s still a beer in the ice-box Dean repurposed from the sink. Sam grabs it and then makes his way to the hallway outside, finding the staircase to the terrace with ease. The roof is chilly and the beer is good, crisp and dancing down his throat, and it takes away a bit of the jaggedness he’s been feeling. The sky is prickled with stars and hazy with light-pollution. There’s the smell of meat and spices crackling on Chinese pans, the sound of late-night delivery vans. It’s lulling, all these earthily little sounds far removed from the shrieking, shuttered surrealism of his unremembered dreams, and Sam doesn’t know—how long he sits there, even after the beer is gone and his eyes are falling shut, he doesn’t know.

New York is ambient noise. And Sam sleeps.

He’s startled awake a third time this night by a banging noise from downstairs. A man’s voice rising in a shout, a muffled yell from Dean, and all of Sam’s senses kick in so fast he’s reeling, he’s getting up too fast, he’s almost too disoriented to know if he’s walking off the roof or towards the stairs.

He’s got nothing on him. Not his gun, not his knife. He’s such an idiot. Sam looks around and finds nothing but wilting plants in pots and a rusted tricycle.

Then he looks down at his hand.

\---

Sam holds the broken edge of the bottle in front of him when he goes down the stairs. His feet are bare and quiet on rough, icy concrete, and he has to rein himself back from sprinting. There are no sounds of a scuffle, nothing at all from Dean. He wants to yell out, but there’s not much space here in this stairwell, nowhere for him to go, and stealth is how he’ll win this game.

 

_Stay calm, Sam. Step right._

He’s at the door. He looks in and Dean’s not there, not where Sam left him, though his gun is gone too, and there’s a fist-sized smear of blood on the sheets. That, there— that’s like being electrocuted, and Sam has to shout.

“Dean!”

Nothing. His voice rings in the night-time quietness but doesn’t sustain. Sam rips through the apartment, checks the bathroom. Nothing. Back in the hallway again, he searches frantically for clues, trails, anything at all. Where could Dean have gone? The single door opposite to Sam and Dean’s is closed and padlocked.  Sam walks to the staircase leading downstairs and peers over it, but it’s too dark to see. The shadows are heavy in the corners, all of them seeming to suggest movement.

“Dean?”

Something heavy crashes into him. Sam skids; his feet skate on two steps before he loses balance entirely and falls, catching his elbow on the edge of a stair and his knee on the next, ending up in a tangled heap at the landing. Pain is immediate and senseless and blinding. It takes a minute or two before Sam can even scramble up, fingers hooked in crevices on the wall, grabbing onto the little irregularities on the surface that cut at his skin. Dust rains down from him and his mouth feels full, his tongue tortured—he’s bitten it, and he spits out the blood. His eyes struggle to focus.

And when they do, it’s on pink eyes and a snowy brow. Dirty white hair, clumped and stringy, and the smell that rolls off the kid is that of unwashed skin and sweat, but also something else. Something _strong._

“Do you have it?” the kid asks.

Sam still has the bottle. His fingers tighten on it, but he’s not going to use it on a kid. This is not a monster. This is just a _person_. Sam backs away till his back hits the wall, swallows his own blood thickly.

“What—what do you want? Where’s my brother?”

The kid’s eyes are startling, rolling madly, darting from Sam to the ceiling to the ground and everywhere in between yet seeing nothing, Sam now realizes, seeing _nothing_.

“Do you have—do you have _it?”_  His fingers jerk; his spine. When he’s quiet, even his mouth twitches uncontrollably as if he’s a puppet with a broken string control.

Sam knows this. This kid’s an addict.

“Look. I don’t—”

The kid’s palm comes up to push Sam against the wall. He’s strong for his size or maybe Sam’s just winded from his fall, but the pressure of the kid’s hand is strong and Sam can’t breathe. There are bits of blackness creeping into his vision, sneaky hints of hellfire.

“Hey, listen—” he tries to wheeze, but the kid just yells a stream of foreign expletives that Sam can’t understand, growing seemingly more distressed by the second. Then he leans forward and licks at the blood on Sam’s lips, warm tongue sucking it all up, and Sam just—suddenly—needs to get him off, needs him _off_. That strange smell is all up in his nose, and white noise is filling his ears, and Sam _needs_ this kid off. It’s imperative, illogical, a wave of horror so powerful it’s all-consuming; and he thinks, he can’t see, he can’t see what’s in front of him, but up there behind the kid there’s a hole yawning up, filled with just the _strangest_ —

“Sam? SAM!”

There’s Dean, running up the stairs. He went the wrong way, Sam guesses, when he couldn’t find Sam. He went _down_. Dean has one hand on his left arm where he’s bleeding from—the kid probably nicked him with a knife— and he’s reaching out for his gun, thinks this kid is a monster or maybe he just doesn’t care. Sam hears the shot go off, and shoves the kid himself, and then he’s free.

He’s gasping and his lungs are screaming for air, and the kid is wailing.

Backing away, with his foot leaking blood where the bullet punctured it.

 He drags himself up the stairs. Two steps too slow, hauling that leg, but then he moves too fast. Too fast for someone—some _thing_ —with a bullet in his foot.

“Shit.” Dean does a cursory check on Sam, quick pats to his shoulder and his chest, and then takes off at a run after the kid. Sam follows, but he’s slower. He can hear Dean yell: _shit,_ and _fuck,_ and other expletives. Bolts of pain are radiating through him, and Sam thinks he’ll pass out, or at the very least throw up. But he makes it to the roof, just in time to see the kid jump.

Sam’s heart freezes.

For a moment the kid just hangs in the air, like he’s found a way to fly. Everything goes still, _everything_ , even the mild drizzle of rain. And then he drops, so quickly; Sam hears the muffled thump all the way up here.

The last flight lasts merely seconds.

“Fuck!” Dean’s saying, running his hands through his hair. He runs to the edge and looks down, and Sam wants to tell him to duck down, don’t be seen, they’ve had enough skirmishes with the law to last Sam one lifetime.

“Son of a bitch!” Dean exclaims, “Jesus Christ!”

Sam falls to his knees. His breath is coming in spurts; his hands tremble. He wipes at his face, frantically, trying to get the traces of the kid’s saliva off. Sam can hear the commotion on the road below, the screaming, and he closes his eyes and thinks of falling.

How it’s not at all like flying. 

 

\---

When he comes to, it’s Dean’s face he sees first. Of course; of course. That’s a given, and he thinks he’s glad. Dean’s lips are moving, but Sam can’t hear him through the noise in his head, that _smell_ of Hell still in his nostrils and burning through his tissues. His eyes tear up from it and at first he feels helpless. Then he just feels stupid.

“Sammy. Talk to me, man.”

Sam’s not sure what he wants to say. He looks around. They’re back in the apartment, it looks like, and Dean looks like he’s going to flip out. Sam finds his shoulder in the semi-dark, pats in silent _I’m okay._

“This is gonna get old soon,” Sam says, finally. “Better hoard up some one-liners.”

Dean smiles. It looks puppet-like. And Sam thinks, _this is not us._ This city, these tall buildings, these streets and people and lack of a sky colored like a sky—that’s not them. What Sam’s used to, and Dean is too—is _lesser_ places somehow, places that haven’t been seen and read and written about, acted on, interpreted and signified and fit into semiotic schema that could never be shaken now. New York, like a giant mirror, reflecting all these things everyone said it was, and did anyone _really_ know what it looked like? Behind Dean the window is a dark slit, no stars, only the silhouette of another run-down building. It’s not cramped; merely boxed-in, and Sam wants to watch it recede in the rear mirror suddenly, wants open spaces and stars, Gas’n’Sips and rolling scenery.

“Sammy,” Dean says again. “What happened? Did you hit your head? Was it—was it Hell again?”

He’s not sure what he saw. Maybe a black space behind the kid’s head—let’s call it a sort of event horizon, beyond which exists some other dimension that you shouldn’t, not in normal circumstances, know about. But Sam’s anything but normal, and beyond his fire-dreams, which conforms most truly to the Biblical fiery-furnace thing, he also thinks he saw geometry. Impossible geometry: ghost structures draped like mourners in glinting tulle nets, towers constructed in the wrong way by taking one piece out of it at a time. Geometry utterly inhuman, yet entrapping.  

He thinks he might have gotten lost there, more than once.

 “I’m fine,” Sam says autopilot, though he wants to ask Dean, _could you get lost in Hell somehow? Inside some structure whose shape you could never understand?_ “Did he hurt you? I saw blood.”

Dean shows him a long scratch on his arm, probably from deflecting a knife. “Came out of nowhere. What did he want? What the hell happened?”

“Nothing happened. He was just a crazy kid.”

Dean’s hands brush over him, regular procedure, checking for injuries. Sam resists the urge to shake him off—yet another concession. Dean must deem him all right, because he says, grimly, “Another jumper.”

Sam’s eyes narrow. “You think this has to do with the case?”

“No.” Dean says, quickly. Then: “I don’t know.”

“ _Dean_ —”

Dean shifts. Then he stands up, looking everywhere but at Sam. “Look, you remember how I said I got wind of this case? That Rufus asked Bobby to put someone on it? That’s not true.”

“I figured that,” Sam grunts, sitting up. His head still spins. There’s a funny taste in his mouth, piquant but forgotten. He thinks of the dead kid and feels his stomach somersault; gets up and moves to the bathroom with Dean following him. “Don’t tell me it was another anonymous co-ordinate, Dean, please. Do we even have any mouthwash around here?”

“No.”

“No, what? Co-ordinate or mouthwash?”

“Both. What’s wrong with toothpaste?”

Sam glares. “Just tell me.”

“Okay,” Dean lets out a breath. And then he grins, and Sam knows, just knows right then that he’s not going to like this one bit.

\---

“You brought us here on a tip from a porn-website chat-board.” Sam mumbles, hollowly.

“I knew you’d—dude, Sam, why do you have to get stuck on that? I _got_ the tip from there, we came because I checked the papers and it seemed strange. Honest.”

“You said it yourself, Dean!” Sam nearly yells. “NASDAQ blues. Fucking recession. People are killing themselves _everywhere._ ”

Dean sighs. “We weren’t that far off. And this girl—she knew us, man. Knew what we did.”

“So?”

“So, that’s fucking _weird_ , right? Ninety percent if they know us, they wanna kill us. Preferably painfully, and with a great deal of monologuing.”

“Oh, wow. It just gets better,” Sam rolls his eyes. “Some girl who you met on a—on a—what kind of website is this anyway? Webcams and shit? Private shows for premium users? Kodachrome Nostalgia nights?”

“Does it matter? It was a strange website. Anyway, Kristil—”

“Her name is _Kristil_?”

Dean throws his hands up. He’s seriously going to fight this out. “Would you let me finish? She knew us, Sam, that’s what I’m saying. She said there’s a case here, and I said fat chance, and then I looked and it seemed right. Pieces fit. And I thought, if there’s no case, at least we should find _her_. Figure out who she is. You know, friends close, enemies closer, unknown on surveillance—that kinda thing.”

Sam took a breath. “And you didn’t tell me this…because?”

A beat of silence. Dean sets his jaw, is shaking his head before he even speaks. “Because after Spiderman, I realized I don’t know _who_ you’ve slept with in the past year.”

“Seriously?” Sam said, tersely. “Fuck you, Dean.”

“Sam— oh, come on, Sammy.” Dean’s getting churlish now. “Don’t get pissed at me for _that_.”

“You’re seriously evaluating taking cases based on my inventory of fucking around?”

“Oh fuck it, Sam. I’m actually happy that you even _have_ an inventory—where are you going?”

“Walk. Clear my head.”

“Not right after you get a face-full of Hell, you don’t!”

Seriously? “My legs, my brain. I think I can handle ambulation without worrying you, Dean.”

Sam compromises. It’s half an hour of pacing back and forth across the street trying not to check if Dean’s watching him out of the window— his paranoid big brother radar on full alert and the ghosts of flu still dampening his spirits— before Sam gives up and phones, and Dean comes bounding down the stairs in two minutes, Sam’s backpack bouncing at his back.

He manages to look apologetic for about half a second, which is nice enough, thinks Sam.

“I’m hungry now.” Sam says, matter-of-fact. “You got the laptop?”                                                                 

They end up at a 24x7 Chinese place that serves soup dumplings and fortune cookies, sitting in a dark booth with a dragon lantern throwing psychedelic patterns on the grimy window. They are the only people in the café other than the proprietress and a waitress who speaks broken English, who looks like she’s probably from Kazakhstan.  It’s solitary in here, at least until it starts to drizzle and a thin young man in an oversize overcoat sweeps inside. He takes a seat, right under the monochrome TV relaying Chinese news. Sam hears him order braised pork, takeaway, watches through the corner of his eye as the restaurant’s ageing proprietress sets a cup of tea in front of him. Steam dances. The young man is jovial, speaks Mandarin; a regular.

Sam is jittery in his seat, a darkness broiling in his mind with nowhere to settle.

Outside, life revives as the night slides slowly into day. Taxis start traversing the street with increasing frequency, doors open and close and spit out all kinds of men and women. Sam attributes them colorful roles: Bible-belt problem-child strung suddenly between Dad in Los Angeles and Mom in NYC; Turkish drag-queen who could pull off gold-eyeliner with aplomb; young actress all the way from South Dakota with a one-way ticket, looking for a role in Broadway that’ll catapult her to success.

The rain drums fingers on the glass. Sam keeps working, lines of code and IP generators all at the ready, head quiet for once.

Dean beats his fingers on the Formica table till Sam throws him a look. And then he starts slurping at the dumplings instead. Sam lets it go on for a few minutes, trying to hide a smirk before it starts to annoy the fuck out of him.

“Dude, stop. And take a look at this, tell me if this is the website.”

Dean frowns, craning his neck to see the screen. “Yeah, it is, at least the name’s same. But it’s not _all_ the same. There’s no chat link in this, for one, and the other one was—brighter, somehow. Busier.”

“That’s because,” Sam says, “you were on the DeepWeb version before.”

He enables The Onion Router, types in the site’s .onion address, and finds a different version this time, a brighter, infinitely more explicit version, and has to blink against the volley of flesh-pink images before pushing it towards Dean. 

“Looks more familiar?”

“Yeah!”

“You used _my_ laptop for porn again, didn’t you?”

Dean grins. “Have I ever used anything else?”

Sam shakes his head. They’re still finding their way around each other post-apocalypse and all that soulless jazz. Sam doesn’t want to push the easy peace. It’s the first time since he’s been topside that he doesn’t feel like taffy, stretched so tight between two points in time that the holes are beginning to show. He breaks open a cookie before he can rant on Dean. His fortune says: _you will acquiesce._ “Well, fuck you,” he tells the cookie, and settles on boring Dean with technicalities instead.

“So get this. DeepWeb, or Dark Web as it’s called sometimes, is anonymous internet. Like—the NSA or the FBI, they can’t see what goes on there, because it’s all anonymous, unindexed, totally lawless. It’s this dump full of scripts that lead nowhere, replicating text, all time-sensitive passwords and pseudo-random IPs—but within it, people have made spaces for themselves,” Dean makes a face, but nods for Sam to go on. “It’s where they run drug markets on the ‘net, child porn, contract killing—shit like that. Also, incidentally, witchcraft, monster sightings, the occult black market—that’s kinda why we use Search the Web, because we’re not gonna get much from Google and the Surface Web. The real weird stuff,” Sam taps his screen, “is down here. As long as you’ve got this thing running—called Tor—you can access Dark Web.” Sam points to the onion-shaped icon on the toolbar. “And I’m guessing _Kristil_ knows all this stuff too, _and_ knows how to track us—which makes her, or _him_ , pretty dangerous if we don’t figure out who they are. Could be a smuggler, could be anything. We’ll have a worse version of Bela on our hands.”

“Her or _him?_ You think Kristil is a dude?”

“Probabilistically? Yeah, sorry, Dean. I don’t think Kristil plays for your team. _He’s_ probably a Silicon Valley bozo living alone in the Upper West Side and talking to his pet cactus while he yanks your chain.”

Dean looks crestfallen. “Shit. There’s no honesty in this world.”

“I feel ya,” mumbles Sam, watching screens flash and load slowly. The Wi-Fi is exceptionally crappy here. “And I hate to ask, but do you have a username on this thing? It’s asking.”

Dean huffs and drags the laptop toward him. “Will you stop Sherlocking me if I give it to you?”

Dean types it in. Two messages; Sam clicks and they fill the screen, both directions to places, one sent just seconds ago. Sam looks around, warily. The young man had disappeared with a brown paper bag of food some five minutes ago, and they are alone again, except for the proprietress and the ghosts in the green-tea steam.

“What?”

“I have a feeling. Based on the timing of the messages. That _Kristil_ is watching us.”

Dean’s eyes widen. He stuffs one more dumpling in his mouth.  “Way to creep me out, dude.” He looks around once, and then taps at the top of Sam’s laptop till he turns it towards him.  “Seems somewhere close to Alphabet City. That’s not far from here.”

“Yeah. Do we go?”

Dean shrugs. “Came all the way.”

Sam nods. He cracks open one last fortune cookie, the pieces breaking on his tongue warm and salty-sweet before he unrolls the paper. _Stay inside from bad weather_ , he reads, and wonders if premonitions can be non-literal.

\---

Sam’s feeling slightly queasy about this even as Dean makes the final turn and his GPS lights up with destination notifications.

“Well, typical.”

“What?”

“New York doesn’t even really _have_ alleys. Stands to reason that the one place we need to scope out is one, right?” Sam shakes his head. The alley is narrow, buildings dark on either side except for one window with a flickering string of Christmas lights. Dean’s eased the Impala into a nondescript location behind a dumpster. Sam shifts, restless, made uneasy by the wind that howls and picks up pieces of trash to whirl against their windows, the downpour that he feels approaching. The premonitory spritzing of rain has heightened into an omen. He’s heard of those people who can tell the weather in their bones, and wonders if he’s part of them. There’s a dull ache at the base of his skull that he attributes to thunderstorms. To rain so hard and so cruel that they’ll be forced to stop, to hunker down in the Impala and hope that the morning will dawn with a clear sky.

“Gonna rain,” Dean says, like he’s reading Sam’s mind, or maybe there’s meteorology in his skeleton too. “It’s done nothing but rain since we got here. It’s just—”

Sam smirks. “We’re talking weather now?”

Dean pauses for a beat. “Too many beers, too less sleep, and early morning reconnaissance. Neither of us are sparkling conversationalists at the moment, brother mine.”

It starts raining then. Sam folds the city map carefully, and makes a face at the radio that’s still spitting out classical. It’s strange now. What’s playing is most definitely not Bach, or Chopin, or anything precisely _like_ any of them. And it’s not orchestra, but…a single harp, maybe? Like Yanni, or some new-age crystal-and-smoke Greek orchestra—

Sam asks, “Can you shut that off somehow?”

 Dean opens one eye lazily; head flopped back on the Impala’s bench seat. “Huh? Shut what—”

“Wait—Ssshh!” Sam shushes him, leaning forward in his seat as a couple of motorbikes race past and into the deep end of the alley.

Dean yanks him back, suddenly alert, his tone crisp when he barks, “Stay low, Sammy.”

“I can’t see anything! Dumpster’s blocking my view.”

Dean frowns. “Uh…okay, so there’s a guy, guy in a suit at the end of the alley—oh, shit, it’s a drop.”

“Huh?”

“Drugs,” says Dean, his mouth a grim line. “They’re drug suppliers. I’m guessing that guy is their pusher…”

The alley is strangely quiet. Sam leans over the bench seat to see and gets Dean’s elbow in his side, pushing him off in annoyance. He settles back and checks his laptop instead. Nothing new from Kristil.

“I don’t like this,” he mutters. “Any of this. What the fuck are we doing here, Dean? Porn-star tips, suicides, and drug dealers—none of this screams us.”

“Wait.” Dean says, squinting. Then he sits up, ramrod straight. “He’s got something in his suitcase. It’s—” Dean’s eyes widen. “Fuck, it’s a soul.”

“A— _what?_ Dean!”

“Sam, come on!”

Dean’s gone before Sam can even tie two and two together. And because it’s just goddamn silly of his brother to rush at drug dealers in an alley, Sam follows. The downpour thickens; Sam sees the dark shape of Dean racing towards the other end of the alley, the rain and the dark conspiring together to make anything further look hazed and unreal. Sam is soaked almost immediately, water falling into his eyes. He rubs at them and sees motorcycle lights, the barest blue spark before it is extinguished—the soul shut back in its suitcase. Déjà vu creeps on him; running through an alley, after a soul, blood rushing in his ears and that awful craving in him. Blood-lust in all sense: denotative, connotative; literal, metaphorical. Not so long ago, but why does Sam feel like a century has passed? Or maybe it had, down there, beyond the wall in his head, and now his perception of time is FUBAR.

Sam’s seen CT scans. Butterflies trapped in brain matter. He wonders, now, if his are iron. Brick. Plaster. Drywall. Flightless, anyway, nothing to do except turn on itself. And it’s okay, he doesn’t except beauty, but it is funny knowing nothing would want his soul. His soul has no trade value. His soul should be the equivalent of a steak run through a wood-chipper by now, whether the animal itself knew it or not.

And so things swirl in his head, these days: fugues of obscure sorrows slowing him down.

Dean is quiet, careful, trying to get close enough to catch a glimpse but not close enough for them to see.

 

Sam walks around the Impala, drawing his gun, but he’s barely taken a step towards Dean when one of the motorbikes wheel around. He hears Dean shout, sees the bike swooping towards him and the motorist put out an arm like he’s carrying a knife. Dean ducks, at the same time that Sam yells, firing a warning shot that hits a wall. The bike keeps coming, towards _him_ now.

And in the glow of its headlights, through the heavy curtain of rain, Sam sees a face that’s all wrong.

The motorist has on a beak-mask, like plague doctors from a previous century. The beak curves to a sharp point that could cut through skin, and even as the rain drips off it, it’s a menacing accessory. The light from the headlights doesn’t gleam off it for some unfathomable reason, but shines star-like in the motorists’ eyes. Flat, derisive stare.

All black, even the sclera.

“Sam!”

Sam wheels away. And then he stumbles, feet slipping on the water, managing to keep his balance and his gun even as he loses out on time.              

The biker gets close enough that Sam can smell oil, rubber burning, a massive wave of sulfur.

It feels like nothing at all. And then it feels like a paper-cut. Next thing, Sam shoots, but the biker skids away, wheels screaming on the tarmac and lights blinding Sam for a second as the bike spins. Sam hears more gunshots: Dean, shooting at the bikers too, but then the bikes roar to life and speed past them, entering the block, disappearing quickly down. The shrieking of their engines judder through Sam. His heart hammers in his chest, fight-or-flight. They hear it for the length of the block, over the rain, and then quiet settles again, coldly.

Dean’s a black shape in the distance. Then he’s footsteps on black pavement, and if ever there was theme music for hunting, this would be it. Footsteps and rain, one party forever chasing another.  The aesthetic mostly always the same: why is it that horrible things most often don’t happen in pretty places? Sam’s always falling down in nasty places, cracking his skull on grimy walls and watching blood spill on dirty sidewalks—

“Are you, are you—” Dean’s here, too close, dripping wet and plucking at Sam.

Sam breathes. He’s okay, he thinks, whatever passes for ‘okay’ these days. There’s a sharp pinging pain in his arm and he raises it to the dim range of his vision, and he and Dean peer at a thin, long cut so shallow that it’ll fade to a line by morning. Tiny drops of blood ribbon out. Sam smears them with his thumb.

“Just trying to spook us, trying to get away,” Dean says, in relief. He’s not letting go of Sam. He slumps a little. “And they got away, damn it.”

“You got a look at that guy? The pusher?”

Dean brightens. “Better still. I got a photo. Could be dark though—”

But Sam’s finding it harder to breathe, all of a sudden. He looks back down at the cut and sees the last of it fading, split skin healing, leaving only reddening.

Dean’s still talking. “And what was the deal with the beak-mask—”

“Plague-mask,” says Sam. His heart is pounding, his vision clears. Every glistering point of light reflected in water suddenly becomes luminous. Sam swallows and his throat feels dry, and there’s a heat in his veins that’s—that’s like—

“What’s wrong?” Dean says, cottoning on.  There’s silence and rain, and Sam looks up at the sky, breathing in shallow gasps, feeling feverish, nervous, restless. The sky splits in fractals and fill with colors, psychedelic swirl.  He blinks and then closes his eyes, and behind them he sees loops of red thread, tangling and untangling, bright loops of twining light. His fists clench, unclench; all of this feels _familiar._

“Sam?”

 

“Maybe we—we should go,” stutters Sam. He looks at Dean and tries to control himself, but he’s pretty sure that he looks frantic. “Dean?”

“Sure, sure,” says Dean, nodding his head too fast, a frown throwing his features into deep relief— _here’s another problem yet again,_ Sam imagines him thinking, and the thought is a small vicious spike in his chest that starts him coughing, a painful seizing in his chest that eases out into more gasping. He won’t look at Dean, won’t look, though it’s stupid. He’s blinded with colors all of a sudden, wheels around like a lost moth till Dean grabs hold of his shirt and starts dragging him closer to the car.

“You wanna sit down?”

 And Sam must say yes, because when he looks up again he’s got his back against the Impala and Dean’s kneeling in front of him, saying his name. Again. Again. How many times? Dean’s face swims in and out of shadows. He twists and warps, wisps out and fades in again. He shines. He has a halo. Sam thinks of saying _Dean_ and doesn’t really know what comes out instead.

It feels like an hour’s passed, but maybe it’s just minutes: when his vision clears, Dean’s still looking at him anxiously.

Sam inhales, experimentally. “Okay—okay now.” he says.

Dean has a death-grip on his shoulder, he sees. It only tightens when he speaks.

“Let’s go back,” Sam tells him. “It was—I don’t know, but it passed.”

“Are you sure? No hospital?”

At the back of his mind rears possibilities of silver knives and neat lines of blood. Sam shakes his head violently. No hospitals.

“Okay, okay.” Dean puts up his arms, placating. Sam’s irritated by that, by Dean hovering. He thinks he kind of wants someone to yell at him to get his act together. Instead, Dean says, “You ready to get up?”

Sam stands, fingers shaking and wrapped around the wet handle of the Impala’s door, and he can still hear the classical music, the chanting, and the low whispering. He has a sudden violent impulse to take a baseball bat to the music system. Instead, he fills shotgun, and keeps his eyes on Dean until his brother slides into the driver’s seat.

 

**DEAN**

 

“Can you—can you stop the music, Dean?”

It’s getting lighter as Dean navigates the blocks and intersections back to Henry, lost in a maze of streets without Sam guiding him. Sam’s got the city map spread on his lap, but he’s not looking at it. In fact, Sam’s not looking at anything for more than 10 seconds. He jerks at sounds and rocks, gazes up and around and out the window and at Dean.

“What music?” Dean asks. “Player’s broken, remember?”

“The—the classical. The—just _stop_ it.” Sam says, and slaps angrily at the thing for extra measure.

“Hey, hey!” Dean snaps. “Dude, it’s not doing anything!”

Sam slaps it again. “Just—”

“Sam!”

“What?” he says, and then he starts and looks at the player again.

“Look at me.”

It’s considerable effort. Sam’s gaze keeps sliding off him, then returning guiltily. There’s high color on him, and if Dean were to make a guess, he’d call Sam about half-way blitzed on some kinda herbal Woodstock enthogen. But Dean can’t make that guess, because Dean had been in that alley too, hadn’t he. He’d seen the thin knife on the biker, the bags of reddish-black crystals that the pusher had taken from them.

Souls, tips from strange places, and weird drugs—he doesn’t know what to make of anything. Least of all Sam; he now had his head in his arms, fingers laced tightly through his hair.

“Hey.” Dean thumps his back while he eases the Impala into their street. “Sammy. Sam, I think a haircut is due, but don’t yank out the stuff, man.”

“What the fuck is wrong with me?”

“Nothing’s wrong with you.” Dean says, firmly. He pulls the car to a stop. “Come on, now.”

It might get to be hard work getting Sam up the stairs, thinks Dean, but it isn’t actually. Sam races upstairs, maybe glad to get away from his imaginary music. Dean follows, thinking about how long this night’s been. He’s barely gotten a wink of sleep, and now he doesn’t dare, not with Sam acting so off.

Sam’s on the balcony when Dean gets there, pacing to and fro like a sleepwalker. Too slowly. Which is bad, guesses Dean. A slow Sam is a thinking Sam, and he can’t think of one instance in his past where that hasn’t gone against his brother.

But, in a vein tougher to swallow, Sam is sort of a wreck. He’s a functioning wreck, which is better than Dean could have hoped for given the circumstances, but he’s still a wreck. It isn’t like Dean doesn’t notice the weird obsessive tendencies creeping up in the corners of Sam’s existence—napkins folded thrice over, bed sheet corners in perfect diagonals, duffels arranged in exactly one particular way—like Sam’s trying to find order in a smorgasbord of chaos, and not even fully aware he’s doing it. Dean doesn’t point out; if he knows anything about Sam, it’s that when he says he ‘wants to share’ he doesn’t always mean it. Maybe he never actually means it.

Dean sits on his mattress and watches him. He cleans his guns, taking longer than usual because he has to appraise Sam occasionally, look for changes. It’s like waiting for things to fall apart. For a moment it feels as if he’s taken a loop and ended up back in the midst of the impending apocalypse. Those days when he wished people had frail, wafer-thin, see-through skulls so he could see what they were thinking inside.

And then the sun comes up, making looking at Sam sort of like trying to skewer his eyes. Making passing a joke or two at him something like trying to find relief.

“You’re not going to keel over and die, are you?”

“I’ll send you a memo first,” snaps Sam, and continues pacing. His lips are pursed tight, fists clenched, all of him locked up—an unknown country. And he’s handing out no passports, so Dean dozes. It’s not a conscious decision, and he can count the stages as they happen. One, two, three—the long blinks. Four, five, six—the yawns. And his eyes, watering, splitting the balcony and Sam and everything beyond into blurry fractals. Dean has disjointed dreams of dark alleys and pools of water, and he looks in and sees confusing flashes of faces.

Sam. Lisa. Ben. Sammy, again.

And so it goes, the dream, like the turning of a screw upon itself.

It’s maybe around nine-thirty when he wakes, startled by the sound of a car backfiring in the street below.  It’s with a shock and a jolt that he sits up, sleep still clawing heavily, cloyingly inside of his skull; and notices Sam’s not on the balcony.

Dean’s heart skips a beat. Two. “Sam?”

The panic always hits too fast these days. He shouldn’t have worried: his brother stands in the tiny bathroom. Dean heaves a sigh of relief, but it is short lived. Is Sam too still? For someone so restless these days, that’s a difficult confidence interval to determine. Dean settles for calling his name again.

Sam seems entranced by the light fixture. His shoulders are shaking, and also his fingers; sweat rings darken his T-shirt in patches.

“Look, Dean,” he says. He turns his head and his eyes are twin pools of terror—Dean hasn’t seen that look since Stull Cemetery, and even then there was some determination to it. This Sam just looks…wrong.

Dean follows Sam’s gaze to where the fixture is turning itself, bending into pretzel shapes. The grimy colored glass on the shade breaks, shards like loose flower petals raining down, and then it swoops back up in a stream and rejoins.

Dean doesn’t understand. Dean has never really understood. “What—what is it?”

“Me,” Sam says, simply, and Dean isn’t surprised either. Sometimes they work that way: deftness in deduction, an eye for foreseeing what could undo them. But the nature of the game is to shove it all down.

The mirror cracks. A startled roach crawls across the jagged edge, and is crushed when the shards move against each other violently, a miniature tectonic quake. Sam breathes heavy and sharp, great little gasps that tells Dean he’s probably losing it, and Dean grabs a fistful of his T-shirt in response, drags him away.

Sam doesn’t resist. “I’m sorry,” he says, in a litany. “I’m so sorry.”

“Stop saying that.”

There are other things out of place: Sam’s duffel is a scattered mess at the far wall of the room, like it’s been thrown with great force, and a beer bottle is bent into an impossible shape. Dean tries to be worried about this, but somehow, he’s out of whack after last year: all he can think of is keeping Sam here within arm’s reach.

All he wants is his brother, whatever fashion he might take. The rest he can live with.

“Shouldn’t be able to do that,” Sam tells him, faintly. There’s a thin trickle of blood oozing down Sam’s left nostril and over his lip. The tip of his tongue catches a drop and Sam flinches violently, rips himself out of Dean’s grip and whirls away, wide dark eyes and confusion evident on his face. Dean wonders if this new thing, this new problem, is another side-effect of the Wall. Or if it was because of whatever had happened just now. What gave you hallucinations and also enhanced psychic powers? How many are they going to catalogue before they run out of space, until Sam runs out of Sam?

“Relax, Sam, it’s okay,” Dean says, carefully. “It’s okay. Sit down. We’ll figure it out. You and me, we’ll figure it out.”

Dean feels like that’s all he’s been saying for years now. But it doesn’t matter, because those times he does, Sam looks at him like Dean’s the only thing anchoring him to the ground, and if he feels that way then Dean doesn’t mind saying it.

He gets Sam to sit down, stay still, hovers till he’s sure Sam’s breathing normally and not going Uri Geller on anything. Sam finally calms down enough to demand his laptop and then he’s lost, filling his head up with whatever information he’s looking for. Dean doesn’t want to push him, and he also doesn’t know what to do, so he hops out to get late breakfast. He doesn’t go far, just to the shop across the street that advertises banana pancakes, which Dean figures is a nice alternative for Percocet and several hours of drugged sleep. It smells like chocolate, frying flour and fruit in the shop, and Dean closes his eyes, breathing in, wondering why the hell it is that they never catch a fucking break. They’re like the Minesweeper game, forever playing a game of caution, but unearthing the mines anyway.

When he comes out, there’s a man standing right in front of their building, with an executive suitcase.

“Good morning,” he calls, and then starts walking away, too fast.

Dean stops, suspicious. “Hey!”

The man turns and Dean catches a glimpse of dark eyes, a curved beak-mask. The suitcase thumps against his thigh as he breaks into a run.

“Hey, stop!”

Dean runs a few paces after him, and then stops when he hears Sam call his name.

“You okay?”

Sam stands at the entrance of their building, shielding his eyes. “I’m fine.”

Dean whips around, and the street is empty. He inwardly curses himself, but Sam’s priority here after all. The guy would’ve known how to get away too. New York is a tangle of blocks, intersections and bridges like swollen joints pulling the city together. You could just disappear. That’s what bothers him about this place: that you could just disappear, and never be found. Maybe all big cities are like that. The force of it always Machiavellian: everyone fights tooth and nail to survive, and ain’t that just another variable to add to the already fucked up Winchester equation of this case.

“What’s with the masks?” Sam asks when Dean joins him. So he saw the man from the window or something, then.

“I don’t know. How are you feeling?”

“Peachy,” says Sam, flatly. “We’re going to meet your porn star.”

“What?”

“Message in your inbox. You need to catch a particular bus from Madison, bound for Harlem. Look for Red Riding Hood.”

“That seriously what it says?”

Sam sighs and rolls his eyes. He looks like shit, but also grim with purpose. “Theatric. I know. Maybe an occupational hazard.”

They take the Impala out to Madison Street.  Sam’s restless again, eyeing the music system with murder in his eyes, and Dean really doesn’t get it. He hates the silence too. But Sam’s always been the one to complain about loud, rambunctious music, and it can’t be good for him right now with the nervousness vibrating off him. Or maybe he misses that familiarity. Dean is regular as clockwork in some things, and he’s invariably forced Sam to build his own existence around those things: the music Dean plays, the distance he likes to push before they stop anywhere, the kinda places he picks to eat. Sam himself chooses less, decides less, and it’s not a matter of anything. It’s just the way they work. It’s Dean’s car, so it’s Dean’s car, and right now, it’s silent as a morgue.

The window rolls down on Sam’s side. And then up. Down again.

“Stop it, Geller. Talk to me.”

“About what?”

It’s a rare offer, thinks Dean. He shrugs. “Anything.”

Sam chatters about technical shit for a while, which is typical, telling Dean _you need to remember this_ and _that_ , but he tapers off by the time they’re almost there, his voice getting thinner and thinner till it just wisps away and he takes a deep breath, before attacking the radio again.  

“What is this shit?” Sam asks. He sounds rigid and breakable, glass-box-Sam in a house ravaged by an apocalypse.

“It doesn’t work, stop turning the dial.”

Sam makes another noise; part frustration, part fear. “Yeah, I know it doesn’t _work_ , but what is this station?”

A couple of off-hand odd conversations surfaces from the mire of Dean’s thoughts. “There’s no station, Sam.”

Sam blinks, confused. “There’s no classical music? No—no chanting?”

“No. ” Dean doesn’t know whether to laugh at him, or cry.

Dean’s coming up to an intersection. He floors the brake, stops behind a VW van spilling swing music.

“You’re not—you wouldn’t lie to me, would you, Dean.”

It’s a statement, thin and stale. Dean looks at him. Sam looks fucking exhausted, jaw stiff and shoulders slumped, eyes darting between Dean and the music player like he’ll flip his shit any second.

Dean says, “No lie, Sammy.”

Sam gives him a wild look that lasts for maybe half a second before he smoothes it over, deft, all practiced Winchester expertise: nonchalance dragged up from somewhere inside him in milliseconds. It unsettles something inside of Dean, makes him feel like it was easier when Sam _didn’t_ have a soul.

He quashes that thought immediately. Focuses on the rain-soaked surfaces, the traffic, the randomness of people walking on and off the road near a micromall.

But Sam is sick and pale, positively vibrating in his seat by the time they reach Madison. “I’m gonna stay here,” he says. He sounds far away. He’s wearing defeat like an iron coat; it makes him wilt into the seat, staring listlessly at the dead radio. Dean can’t bring himself to ask. Not when Sam looks like silence and pure will is all that’s holding him together. “I’ll stay in the car. You meet her, find out what this is about.”

“You’re sure?”

 “I have a very bad feeling—” starts Sam, worrying at his lip. He stops abruptly.

“About what?” Dean asks.

“You don’t know what’s playing on the radio.”

“Nothing’s on the radio, Sammy. You know what? We’ll just go. Let’s drop all this, and go right now.”

“No! No, Dean, no. This—,” he turns the window up with his freaky powers, “—shouldn’t be happening again. We need to stop this. I can’t—”

A bus pulls up. Dean watches it like through a cinemascope—the wind scattering leaves across the street, a young man running towards the bus, the numbers on it that match the ones in the message in his inbox. Sam’s looking at it too. A flash of alarm flits across his features. “Go, Dean, that’s it!”

The bus is almost pulling off the curb. Dean has to rush at it, and even then he’s unsure if he’ll make it, but then he hears a long blaring horn from the Impala and knows Sam’s got his hand pressing it right down, and the bus slows down.

*

It isn’t a long journey on the bus to Harlem—nondescript neighborhoods are flashing by when Dean gets himself and his heart settled long enough that he can slide off his seat and into the aisle. There aren’t many passengers. His eyes flit over an old woman knitting near the front, a young lady with a heavily pregnant belly counting a rosary and swiping at mascara-blackened eyes. There’s a man in a worn suit worrying through a classifieds paper, and near the back, a kid in a red hoodie.

As Dean’s eyes alight on him, the kid throws back his hoodie and grins, and there’s entirely too much silver and too less hair on that face.

“Ilya Jameson. Nice to meet ya?”

Dean feels something between a sigh and a snort of resignation building up in his chest ( _this_ is Kristil? He’s been had), and compensates by glaring.

 Jameson (what the fuck did he say his first name was?) blinks, unfazed. His eyes are a droopy, murky brown. They barely lift from the screen he’s almost headfirst in.

“Come on,” he says, making a crude boob-shape with his free hand. “You didn’t _really_ expect me to be a girl?”

“I didn’t expect you to be a pimply little punk, either,” snaps Dean, striding close and sitting down beside him. Jameson is about as tall as Sammy when he was fifteen, which is not very. He’s also about as intimidating, which again, isn’t _very._ He’s got a Playstation, and a quick glance tells Dean it is GTA. Kid’s player character is on the streets blowing everyone’s legs off with Uzis. Sam definitely didn’t do _that_ when he was fifteen. He seems like any other person—ratty Doors T-shirt, jeans, shiny iPhone peeking out of the back pocket. 

“Yuppicide,” Jameson says, tilting the game towards Dean. Dean notices his fingers twitching on the buttons and maybe Jameson sees him looking, because he switches the game off abruptly, stashing the PS in his dirty looking backpack. “Special cheat-code I developed. Cool, yeah? Kill ‘em all, I say.”

“I’d like to kill _you_ right now. You got two minutes, kid. Tell me who the fuck you are.”

“Why don’t _you_ prove who you are, first?”

Dean grunts, and then brings out his wallet, flashing the FBI card at the kid. Jameson scrutinizes it closely, and a snigger lights up his face. “Not _this._ Prove you’re _Dean Winchester._ ”

“Sorry, I left my cape at the launderer’s, and the spandex costume’s just not right for the weather.”

“Cut the crap, dude.”

“Or what?”

“Or I’ll just get off at the next stop, play some more, grab a little KFC, and head?”

“Oh, it’s not that simple,” smiles Dean, looking right at the kid. “You see, my brother’s got a few tricks up his sleeve. And he tells me, you’re into Dark Net.”

“So?”

“So, he ran a check on your IP—which, he says, you change daily, that must be hard work—and he also told me that you help some guys on the online drug black-market. What’s it called again? Oh, yeah. The Silk Road. I heard the FBI was interested in that?”

Jameson just stares at Dean. After a few seconds or so, it starts getting disturbing.

“What are you waiting for?”

“Emotions,” says the kid, smugly. “Tell me something I care about.”

 Dean wants to bang his head against something suddenly. Or smash the kid’s face in, but he thinks of Ben. Thinks of Sam. He exhales, slowly. Then he unearths his real driving license from a hidden seam on the wallet, sticking it as close to the kid’s eyes as he can, forcing him to jerk back.

“Happy now?”

The kid squints to read. “Kansas, huh?”

“Get to the point, midget.”

Jameson puts his legs up on the seat, Indian-style. “Look, I’m gonna be clear with you, yeah? I know some shit is going on? That your type is usually interested in? And I tracked your IP with an algorithm that monitors searches—Sam didn’t cotton on, because I used a Markov sequence, and Sam didn’t do computers in college, did he?—I know, for a fact, that you guys took down a spider creature in Rhode Island—yeah? And… uh... dragons before that?”

“You know my brother’s LSAT score too?”

“I could look it up? Stanford’s easy.”

“You’re some kind of, I dunno, man-machine computer-hybrid kids, aren’t ya.”

“They call us _screenagers._ ”

“Who do?”

“Oh. Advertisers. The media guys.” Jameson looks at his shaking fingers. “The dudes I sell to on Silk Road.”

Dean groans in disgust. “What do you want?”

“For you to _see_.” Jameson says. He stands up, just as the bus suddenly slams to a halt. “Come on.”

“Where?”

“I know you have a gun, Dean? And I’m unarmed, dude. Does it matter?”

“Yeah, it does,” grumbles Dean, but he shrugs and follows the kid anyway.

They get off in a street Dean has never heard of, and Jameson walks ahead while Dean lags behind. The buildings here are in disrepair, and graffiti splatters the brick facades of the buildings. A diner with a fly-speckled window and a Laundromat makes for most of the scenery, and past a wired fence lie railway tracks. Jameson jumps over the fence, and Dean follows him, across the tracks and onto street that quickly becomes a strange, art-infused tunnel. Jameson suddenly stops in front of a giant rendering of a psychedelic Jimmy Hendrix, and stands facing Dean, holding out a transparent file.

Dean raises his eyebrow. “What’s this?”

“Check it out, bozo.”

They’re printout of web-pages. Silk Road in most, some other site named Madboy Mutt. All of them advertise a strange crystalline substance. _Journey Red._

“New happy pills?”

“Hit the web a few months ago. And we’re curious, yeah, selling crack and glass here? So when this guy calls, telling me he’ll get me a deal to sell ‘Red, I’m like—radical cool shit, man. I’ll make some money, stay alive a little longer ‘coz I’m selling online, you know?”

“I _don’t_ know.”

Jameson rolls his eyes. They’re very clear; eerily glass-like. “Okay, whatever, Deano. If you wanna pretend you’ve been clean all your life—good going, man. But everyone’s got _some_ drug. Needn’t be chemical, ya know?”

The way everything ends with a question mark with this kid is annoying Dean. He wonders if that’s a new in-thing. With that thought he feels like an old man, which just annoys him further. “Don’t sprout philosophy now, _screenager_. What does this have to do with us?”

Jameson rolls his eyes towards Hendrix’s rainbow afro. “Patience, hullo? Or did that die in the 60s?”

“Hey,” Dean says, enraged. “How old do you think I am?”

Jameson grins. Yanking his chain, then, jeez. Sammy was right. “Chillax. Anyway, I thought this guy was, you know, chums with Dread Pirate Roberts, the way he was talking.”

“What, from the Princess Bride?”

“ _No._ The guy who runs Silk Road—he’s called _Dread Pirate Roberts,”_ Jameson stamps his foot. “Who the fuck cares? Listen, do you want the story or not?”

“Journey Red. New drug. Got it.”

Jameson lights a cigarette. “Okay. And I was gonna sell it only on some special days, and on this site called Madboy Mutt? To _specific_ clients.”

“Who were?”

“All your dead men,” Jameson says. For the first time, his gaze drops to the floor. The smoke from his lips is luminous in the light flowing in from the tunnel-entrance behind Dean.“Every single dead guy on your list—they all bought the poison from me, man? Fucking poor bastards. And I know—yesterday, I _knew_ , the others are dying too.”

Dean takes a step forward and the boy _actually_ cowers against the wall. “The others?” His voice is a receding glacier.

“So I was selling only on Madboy at first,” whispers Jameson, quietly. “And then, one day, I sold on Silk Road. It was up for just a few hours—”

“Who’d you sell to?”

“No one you’d know.” Jameson says, quickly. And then his gaze flickers up to Dean, almost imperceptibly. “Except for that kid who jumped off your apartment building last night.”

Dean’s jaw drops. “You _have_ been watching us, you little shit.”

Jameson throws up his hands. “I had to! I had to know what you were doing, if you could somehow figure it out yourself, without me having to show—but that’s not the problem. Do you _see—_ ”

“Oh, I see the problem,” Dean snarls. “You’ve been selling poison to people.”  

“Who _suicide._ Tell me what the fuck kinda poison does _that._ ” He roots through the papers in Dean’s arms, picks out one that looks like a medical report. “Ain’t got not much poison in this. Just a load of natural stuff and sulfur.”

Dean can just feel this case start to dive down trouble-street. “Sulfur?”

“Y-yeah, is that a—is that a problem?”

“Of the monumental kind.” Dean says, grimly, and snatches the report from Jameson. He has to get to Sam. He starts walking backwards. “Good luck staying alive, kid.”

Jameson suddenly grabs at Dean’s jacket, fingers twitching and crawling on the material. “You can’t just leave!”

Dean whips out his gun. Jameson pulls his breath in on a long gasp, like he’s choking underwater, but doesn’t relinquish his grip. “Let go.”

“Look,” Jameson says, his eyes wide and anxious, in a tone that reminds Dean of scared, flightless baby-bird squawks. “I wouldn’t have contacted you if I hadn’t been in trouble, myself.”

Dean doesn’t even have to think to put two and two together. “You’re dying. You took that fucking drug.”

“You—you don’t get it. There’s someone behind this. You saw them, yesterday, with the funny Black Death masks and all. There is a _man_ —”

“ _Who_?”

“He calls himself Orpheus.”

“Guy who brought his dead wife out of the underworld? That’s…pretentious.”

“It’s because of the music.” Jameson says. “And, well, he didn’t _actually_ bring Eurydice out in the myths; she got left behind when—”

“What music?”

“I don’t know, it’s like—magic. You can’t hear it. But _I_ can.”

Alarm bells ring in Dean’s head. “Does it sound like classical?”

Jameson nods. “Orpheus. He plays the lyre, man, or the harp? In the myths. But that’s not why the music is important,” the kid draws a deep breath. “It’s culling music.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning it induces people to kill themselves.”

He really hates it when monsters get smart. “ _What?_ ”

“It’s…you can’t help it, Dean. There’s this thing called binaural beats. It affects your psyche? And suddenly, like, you want to push a knife into your own heart. You don’t even _think_ through—”

“Orpheus is collecting souls—”

“—without getting his hands dirty. I know. I did my homework well.”

And Dean hadn’t. The music Sam’s been talking about, yesterday’s strange attack— and now, Sam may be Billy Pilgrim and Rip van Winkle all rolled into one, but he knows when something is wrong, and he’d known, hadn’t he?

“ _Shit._ ”

Jameson takes one look at him, and then starts striding forward with purpose. “Train’s quicker.”

It’s not a long journey. Dean spends most of it trying to reach Sam on his cell, increasingly agitated as it keeps going to his voicemail. He thinks he’s quite ready to puke by the time they draw to their station. Jameson seems to know the city well, navigating the blocks with ease, and before long they’re in the same alley where Dean had left the Impala.

“That’s…” Jameson says, stopping dead a few paces away. “There’s the music.”

Dean doesn’t give a damn about the music. He stops at the window, and then feels his stomach drop. His throat goes dry.

“Shit!” He says again, and slaps the roof of the car, spins on his foot and yells, loud as he can, “SAM!”

A bolt of thunder is all that answers him. And then there’s rain. A sky that roils, ominous. Everything like a prelude, and the calm overture of rain.

“Sammy!”

“Come on, check the buildings,” Jameson yells. “Come on, Dean!”

There are no lighted windows on this street, no warm signal in any direction. Jameson leads him to an iron staircase that zigzags to the top of a building narrowly, and up on the roof is what looks like a squatter’s paradise: possessions in plastic bags, alcohol bottles, Trojan wrappers and other junk. Beyond: lights and rain fractals to mire the other rooftops in various shades of grey. The wind steals Dean’s voice. The water’s like oil, thick and black, and in the distorted landscape Dean loses his brother again and again, phantom dark shapes all around him falling and breaking. The rain gets in his eyes, and damn, he _wishes_. Wishes he hadn’t taken that bus. Because if Sam falls a second time…

 “Motherfucking—” Jameson rasps out on an inhale, and Dean looks to where he points. There’s a dark shape on a roof across the street, by what looks like a skylight.

“Oh, fuck, no. No.” Dean moans.

“Give me your gun.”

“What?”

“Jesus, just—”

A shot. Dean startles; his heart loud in his ears, but so does—it appears—Sam.  The figure takes a step back. And then it entirely disappears from view.

*

The rain’s still coming down five hours later, when Dean’s sitting opposite Jameson at a perky, cheerful little café called Poppins, dripping water all over the floor and shivering.

His feet burn. He doesn’t know for how long he’d searched the buildings, up and down stairs and through narrow corridors; his retinas flash after-images of room after dingy room that he’d passed through, looking for Sam. Four hours later, though, he’s been forced to give up. Forced to find another way, though every fiber of his being wants to stay on that same alley, knowing it’s useless. It’s gotten darker, and the storm isn’t letting up. Jameson started looking close to collapse, and shit, it wasn’t even this kid’s requisite to search for _Dean’s_ brother. Dean felt he owed him dinner, and now Jameson’s eating like he’s never seen food in his life. He’s already knocked back an entire steak, several funny little spring rolls, and a hit of Scotch with a kiss of ice-cream. Dean only has the brandy and even that in huge mouthfuls he feels scoring holes in his throat and stomach as he gulps it down.

This couldn’t happen, not this close to…everything else that had happened. _Stupid city_ , thinks Dean. His knee taps a rhythm on the underside of the table while he waits. He’d like to smack some sense into this kid, hold him upside down and shake him till all his dirty little secrets tumbled out of him and smacked into the pavement, but one thing he knows for sure is that people who haven’t got anything to lose never usually volunteer for Good Samaritan-ship.

But still. Every second he waits is crucial. Chills run up and down his spine thinking of empty soulless music spilling out from a radio that doesn’t even work. And if it makes people want to kill themselves, if it magnifies whatever it is inside of them that are wrecked and twisted…then Dean can’t imagine a worse ending for either of them. He’s never subscribed to those who say suicide is weak. You keep going and keep going until one day you can’t, and maybe when you reach that clarity, that’s the strongest you’ve been in months. And then you either knock on a door, or let yourself slide into oncoming headlights. Either way carries weight, carries variables.

“We got to stop this. Whatever’s doing all this, this weird soul-collection gig—we’ve got to stop them.”

“Mmm,” tries Jameson, with his mouth full of Scotch. And then again, “Orpheus.”

Dean shivers. “Ugh. Dude doesn’t match up with my image of him.”

“What’s your image of him?”

“Little curly-haired sad guy in a toga.”

“Okay.” Jameson says, pushing his plate away finally. He reaches into his hoodie and pulls out another sheaf of papers. “Printouts. From the Grim Boards.”

“What the fuck is a Grim Board?”

“Place on the ‘net where you go to see bad stuff. Not stuff that gets you super friendly with your hand. _Real_ bad stuff? Snuff film and such-like.”

Who even says ‘such-like?’ Dean whips the grainy papers towards him, staring intently at the blurry photographs on it. Dead people. Dead, _pulverized_ people. Jesus. He doesn’t know what’s worse: the horrific photos, or the fact that most of them have weird fetishistic comments beneath them.

“This stuff,” he mumbles, depositing it unceremoniously back on the table, “is sick.”

Jameson puffs up, defensive. “Feed’s from H-A-W-T Dead dot com. What’d you expect, posies?”

Dean shakes his head to get rid of the images. “What am I lookin’ for?”

Jameson grins. He pulls out another sheet of paper, all theatrical, and smoothes it out on the table for Dean to see. “Read the comment under the post.”

The photo uploader has a generic name: dave53. Dave53 is also a “rookie”, according to the site’s membership badge system, and a small red flag next to the comment he’s posted under his content marks it as spam.

 _I run with a crowd that’s into selling a new drug. We give it to the poor dumb fucks until they’re hooked, and then we kick ‘em to the curb when they come looking for more. Party’s in Montauk, but it’s not like_ THEY _know that. Anyways, most of them end up dead down an elevator shaft. Must be better than a hundred orgasms or something, this thing, and you can find out if you wanna. If you got the guts to try it, call me._

The message’s followed by a phone number.

“So? Do we call Dave?”

Jameson shrugs. “Number’s not valid.”

“Isn’t that peachy. Then?”

“Actually, Dave probably shouldn’t have opened his gob?” Jameson says, unconcerned. “Journey Red’s got someone dangerous behind it. But what’s important is—”

Dean closes his eyes briefly. “— _party_ _in_ _Montauk_.”

 “Yep. Well, that, and the fact that dave53 is running around photographing your dead guys. Disturbing enough, but let’s let that slip.”

“You got a sample of this drug?”

Jameson nods.

“Okay, then. You take it to a lab, run it. I’m gonna dig up some dirt on this Montauk business.”

“I’ve already run it.”

“Jeez.”

“I like to keep busy on my feet.”

“Well, aren’t you just the perfect geek-boy. Let’s see?”

“I told you. It’s just sulfur. And natural compounds. Protein, albumin, bicarbonates…in fact, the technician said the composition was similar to blood, just—”

 “ _What?_ ”

“Blood. Which makes sense, considering how half the online community these days is all into that vampire shit, you know?”

“Too well.” Dean growls. That memory is still fresh in his mind. He remembers how vampire blood lit his veins on fire, crawled into spaces in his brain and screeched for more. He remembers sweating and gasping and standing in Lisa’s hallway, out of control, like an addict who’d kill anything to get his next hit.

 _Like_ _an_ _addict_.

An image of Sam in the morning, wiping blood from his nose and bending things into pretzels pops unwanted into Dean’s head.

Fuck. He’s been stupid.

“So in the myths—” he asks, “how long did Orpheus stay in Hell, anyway?”

Jameson looks it up. “There’s no proper ending to that story. I mean, it says here, that he either got ripped to death by pissed off women and thrown into Hell, or that he just stayed under, always looking for Eurydice—”

“A long while then,” nods Dean, frantically. “And Hell wasn’t happy with him, so he could as well be a demon now, right?”

“A _what?_ ”

“Never mind. That stuff you’re selling? That’s demon blood. Don’t ask me how they crystallized it, I don’t know—but. Yeah. Oh, that’s just wrong town.”

“Demon blood is a _drug_?”

But it made sense. If it was the way Dean thought it was, then Sam had never had a chance. He’d been hearing that radio from the get-go, not knowing what it was. Following the attack in the alley, he’d been nervous and agitated and confused, psychic power escaping him uncontrollably the way it used to, back when Yellow Eyes had been ‘round. Back when he’d been drinking from Ruby’s vein.

Dean had explained it away as a side-effect of the wall Death had put up in Sam’s head, but what did Dean know.

Dean’s phone rings. It’s the Precinct. They’ve got another body, and for a moment his insides twist horribly, but then the calm detective on the other side tells him that this one’s got ‘at least twenty bullet wounds, which look a year old, a missing kidney, and it was wearing a funny mask’.  It’s female. Probably a dead demon, then.

“I’m driving to the morgue, see if there’s some clue about Montauk on that body,” Dean tells Jameson. “You can come with, if you want, long as you don’t mess around.”

“No, thanks.” Jameson shakes his head. “I’m not going anywhere near cops. I’ll ask on the Boards about Montauk, run some frames, see if something shows?”

“Do that.”

They part at the door. Dean walks a few steps towards the Impala, and then turns to yell, “Hey, kid! Don’t switch on the radio.”

Jameson nods, flashes what Dean interprets as a friendly middle-finger, and takes off down the street after a slowing bus.

*

“Jesus, Sam, just call me,” Dean’s muttering into his phone when he pushes through the glass doors of the morgue. There’s been a single vague text from Sam: _a little alone time? please?_ And an emoticon whose meaning Dean will never comprehend. He looked at that yellow face a while, trying to get it to spill its secrets, feeling diffuse, something with a reflection but no substance.  

Everything is too bright, stark after the darkness of the storm outside. Light blares around him like something physical, something he can touch, and for a moment everything catches up to Dean. Everything about this case, and everything that came prior, and it’s like being kicked in the stomach by a circus strongman. 

He doesn’t, of course, have time for this shit.

“Sammy,” he says, cursorily into the phone. _Pull it together, Dean._ And then something breaks. His anger breaks, or his will, or maybe he just breaks. It’s unclean and jagged. It’s an ache in his ribs like teeth. It’s “Please” through the phone, like a whispered prayer.

Dean wades through light towards a year-dead body.

It’s young. It’s wearing red lipstick, smudged, like a film noir heroine. Remnants of that lipstick are on the underside of the plague-mask that was among its personal effects. Other than the bullet wounds marring its body, there’s a fresh looking knife-wound, fire-blackened skin crawling across its torso from the epicenter. 

 _Her,_ Dean corrects in his head _._ Not it, her. Not that it matters.

The hole’s from Ruby’s knife, of course, Dean can tell. What’s alarming is a cut in her neck made too precisely, too deliberately.

 _Not this again,_ Dean thinks, and slides the body back into its sterile drawer.  

He contemplates calling Bobby, but they’ve been in Bobby’s hair far too much recently, and fuck it, Dean should be able to handle his brother. That’s what Dean does, what he’s supposed to do. Dean should be able to handle anything, not feel cemented to the ground. He feels like the loop of _something’s wrong with Sam_ started up again before it even slowed down, a glitch in an eternal carousel, and he doesn’t like thinking of it that way. But dammit, what he wouldn’t give for just a stupid salt-and-burn and a country side to watch out of his window right now. Just him and Sam and some easy, bloodthirsty ghost.

And then his phone rings again. Loud techno-warble tone. He hasn’t been big on ringtones lately.

“Sam?”

Nothing. Dean thinks he hears dripping, water running, breathing.

Dean walks quickly outside. “Sammy, whatever you heard, whatever you did, all of it is manufactured. All of it is a ploy. You need to know that.”

“ _It’s_ _not_ …,” a voice whispers, and Dean tries not to be disappointed, tries to be objective, but he just wants his brother. It’s been long enough; how much more of this imprecise plotline can he take? Can’t think of Sam as one more statistic; cragfast in a storm. That’s what this life’s been about: keeping Sam a _person,_ not just a number on someone’s archive.

“What is it?”

“ _One of those guys is outside my place,”_ Jameson mumbles. “ _S-suitcase and all_.”

Dean’s already crossing over to the car. “Address. Now.”

Jameson rattles it off, and it’s not too far. Dean can hear _Ramble On_ in the background, ambient noise, and someone speaking foreign language. The dripping sounds continue. There’s laughter too. Some space with thin walls.

“Where are you right now?”

“ _Common bathroom on the top floor of my apartment_.”

“Stay right there. Is anyone else with you?”

 “ _People_ _come and go_. _Dean_?” 

“Yeah?”

“ _I can hear the music._ ”

Dean takes the back stairs to Jameson’s apartment when he gets to the building, carefully avoiding catching the eye of the weirdo near the front entrance. Just tells you something about this place that no one passing him by even bats an eyelid about somebody in a coat and a plague mask standing right on their street. It’s a fringe neighborhood with gentrification written all over it, and there’s people buying ice-cream from a vendor nearby, teenagers shoving each other good-naturedly, boom boxes screaming and trashy old second-hand cars wheeling. If you close your eyes and step into some corner deprived of this tinsel dazzle, then there are sounds of lawless night. Violence, wreckage, thuds, bangs and crashes. Spinning through, music.  Someone’s playing salsa music. Someone else, a violin. And then there’s this guy, still, all out of place. Popped in from whenever the Black Death was and stayed and maybe later he’ll show up in some social media junkie’s Weirdest Photos of the Year.

Dean thinks of music again, and wonders what that song of doom sounds like. What kind of music makes you want to kill yourself? It should have to be very sad. Somehow aqueous. It should have to be like some tasteless poison with an incredibly pretty name.

Dean’s legs are hell on the five sets of stairs he has to run up before he pushes his way into a dingy, cramped bathroom.  A man in a bathtub full of suds lazily opens one eye before sinking back down. There’s a girl putting make up on by the mirror, flashing him a quick smile as he passes her by. Jameson’s standing by the window, shaking, T-shirt drenched with sweat. He’s looking straight down at the soul-collector guy.

“You’re not ending up in that suitcase,” Dean says firmly, and drags him away from the window, disgusting fistful of shirt and all. “And my morgue search turned up nothing, except that my brother could possibly be in bigger trouble than I thought.”

“Bigger trouble than dead?”

“You don’t weigh these things that way.”

Jameson’s eyes are flat. He stumbles and drags his feet while Dean pushes him towards his apartment door, which is the source of the Led Zeppelin. Jameson blanches when he hears the music and tries to push past Dean and back outside—and then stops when Dean pulls out the plug to the tinny black stereos attached to the iPod.

“It stopped. But it’ll come again.”

“I guess you weren’t actually hearing _Stairway to Heaven,_ ” Dean says. “There’s a pun in there _somewhere_.”

Jameson nods, white-faced. He’s still shaking, but he’s also looking around with purpose, which gives Dean some hope.

“Wow. All this place needs is a Stargate.”

“Oh, fuck you, you’re so 90s.”

Jameson’s apartment is something out of a cyberpunk movie. Everything from floppies to CDs to drives and strange reels, two gigantic LCD screens right out of a Ghostfacers’ wet-dream, and a bunch of stuff Dean doesn’t even recognize. Lights glint and pulse along lengths of fiber: no doubt a shady arrangement to score extra bandwidth. A Grey code poster hangs above the screen, a seemingly meaningless list of words squeezing up next to it. Modems and routers blink. Apart from cyber-junk Dean spots a mountain of second-hand _Maxim_ , _Heavy Metal_ and similar magazines, several Chinese takeout boxes, and a Princess Leia metal sign.

Then there’s a driving license that states Jameson’s full name, and the fact that he’s from North Dakota.

“That’s a far way.”     

Jameson shakes a hand dismissively, and then points to the screens. The LCDs show ghostly grey shapes, blurry corridors, what looks like the view through a window out toward sea.

“I hacked into some cameras of houses along Montauk. There’s one under an O. Henry, which is just plain weird, and look—”

Dean looks closely. There seem to be a lot of people on the yard of one particular house. Some of them with blurry face-masks.

“Is that it, then?”

“Yes. But something else happened—check this out.”

Black screen with code. Dean blinks, expecting it to do something—repurpose itself into hexadecimal brightness for him, maybe.

“Uh…I think I’m somewhat not your target audience for this, Astro Boy.”

“Jesus, this is _your_ IP. As in, _Sam’s_ IP. ”

“Wait, what?”

“It’s a copycat script. It’s latched onto me somehow, like a parasite, and it’s following wherever I go on the Web. Copying the same addresses, the same links, the same pathways. Duplicating everything I do. Like bots do, but I don’t know how he managed a copycat for a disallowed script.”

“Ignoring the blah-blah, you’re saying Sam knows about the Montauk house.”

“I’m saying that, yeah. And, here’s a ginger-snap cookie _special_ for you,” Jameson says, “Sam’s got his Wi-fi routed to his laptop through his phone.”

“You can tell that from a bunch of numbers?”

Jameson rolls his eyes. “Maybe you should upgrade yourself. Dean Winchester, Version 2.0.”

Dean taps on the kid’s head with a pencil. “Don’t hit me where I’m weak, I just saved your bacon.”

“Sorry,” nimbly, ducking away before the pencil lands again. And he looks sorry. “I’m rude when I’m nervous.”

“Suck on a lollipop then.  Just tell me where he is.”

“Where do you think he’s going?”

Dean shrugs. “If he’s not in the right mind, anywhere he thinks he can fix something.”

“House is near Montauk Point Lighthouse. And I’m coming with.” He really doesn’t want to.

“You’re doing nothing of the sort,” Dean snaps. He pushes Jameson down onto a chair. “Stay here. Right here, right in this room. Read a book. Jerk off. Don’t switch on anything audio. Do something stupid, and stay alive.”

Jameson glows with barely concealed relief. “I’ll track you? Help you find the way?”

 “Do that, then. Be useful.”

“But you don’t know what you’ll find there.”

Dean feels oddly calm about that. He wonders if he’s been in this life long enough, and deep enough, that he’s at that point where none of the details matter anymore. A day, an hour, a minute at a time, and maybe sometimes hyper-attention to detail itself is a deal-breaker. “How exciting.”

“How will you kill Orpheus?”

“He’s just a demon at the end of the day.”

 “What about that…thing down there?”

“I’ll take care of that.”

Minutes later, Plague Mask is no longer Jameson’s problem and Dean is trying to figure out which way to go. The night sky up there is a vague battlefield: cut in three, the upper part coal-mine black, then the grey of binary thistle, the lowest the solemn amber of suspended light. He maneuvers through homicidal traffic, past tinsel-shred people moving together like blips of rainbow bar-code, and then follows Sam’s map towards the general direction of Montauk.

He only hopes he isn’t lagging behind by too much.

*

The roads get worse outside of the city, and Dean is forced to decelerate. Things get staler: from chrome skyscrapers to chain-linked parking lots, exotic potted plants to gorse. Dust and tree-less acres and dismal residential streets, and wow: really setting the mood here, NY. If he sees anymore concrete shingling and suburbanization, Dean thinks he’ll scream. New York’s towers disappear in the rear view mirror pixel by pixel: a metropolis washed in twilight.

The rain’s coming down again when he gets close to the lighthouse, any rare traffic sounds liquefying, all the wet surfaces reminding him suddenly and intensely of _Blade_ _Runner_ , as if it’s just caught up with him like a flotsam thought trailing all the way from the city. Dean thinks, when this is all done and dusted and things are as normal as it gets in Winchester-land, they should watch it again. Count it an up-gradation, and fuck you, Jameson.

 The low thrum of worry in his stomach: that he tries to ignore.

He feels like he and Sam are on a tailspin here when it comes to the un-nameable things: like trust, or expectation, or righteousness. That, he tries to ignore too. Once maybe not so far in the future from here, all this is going to come back at them in a clusterfuck-shaped package. That much is crystal clear. What’s Dean going to do about that? He doesn’t yet know. Mostly nothing. He’s learned to settle for minimums, and right now the minimum set is nothing or Sam. Intersection, union, complement: he’s tried those. Taking himself out. Factoring in Lisa. Factoring out hunting. And it all just comes back to Sam, and he’ll take Sam. Even if it’s nothing but the idea of him.

Dean takes a loop and gets on the Old Montauk Highway, and then is lost for a while before GPS tells him that he shouldn’t be on this side of the town at all. And then he reaches a point where GPS tells him he shouldn’t be in the car at all.

He hikes out, past the fences and beyond the reach of the streetlights, past boxy condos and cheap motels all empty out of season. The Atlantic thunders at him, choppy and white-capped, a tremendous sound. Around him, the sheer cliffs of Montauk start looking ominous. Nothing ever happens in happy places. It’s a Sam-observation, spoken aloud wonderingly. There’s always some decay, or portent, or plain old horror story elegance. Right now, Dean agrees.

“Where am I?”

Jameson coughs into the phone. “ _Starting with hullo would be nice.”_

“Dude, it’s raining,” mutters Dean, tiredly.

“ _Walk a little farther to Ditch Plains. Um…and I’m tracking Sam’s GPS, and—_ ”

“He’s here?”

“ _Yeah?”_

Damn this all. What the hell is Sam thinking anyway? Or _is_ he thinking? This has been a hell of a year for him, and Dean wouldn’t put it past him to snap. Get angry at something, some cause, something external of him that he could take care of. And if he’s fortifying that anger with other things—only, Sam _wouldn’t_. Not anymore, he wouldn’t. Dean wants to believe that.

“ _Do you see it?”_

“I see a house.”

“ _Okay, that’s it. There’s a little path leading in from the beach. And, I think the house has ways to kill bugs, so you might not hear me?”_

Great. Dean takes that path. He ends up at a motorized door with a keypad next to it. Jameson’s the ghost in his ear, muttering key codes, and only a few finger taps later, a motor whines and the door slides open.

Dean finds himself in an austere, narrow corridor that smells like ice, fish and sawdust. Industrial rope lights mark the way along the floor, which leaves the upper half of the room in shadows that seem to dart around with every step that Dean takes. He comes across three dead demons in masks. Knife-wounds.

 It gets colder the deeper he goes, and is positively frigid by the time he comes to the next door, which opens into a dark kitchen.

Or at least, it looks like a kitchen. Functionally, it might as well be a freezer.

The water drops that had fallen on the sink are all frozen. A thin film of frost coats the tap, and the air has the brittle quality of being industrially cooled. Something reeks. A sea-smell, an earth-smell, a cross-breed-of-both smell. Dean sneaks around and tries to be like a specter, but succeeds only in nearly giving a harmless-looking man in a chef-hat an almost heart-attack. And then he gives the man a blind, dirty shiner, which will blow up purple as a puffer fish tomorrow and make for interesting conversation, but currently only serves to knock the man flat on his back on the kitchen tiles, unconscious.

Dean feels oddly apologetic. He’s knocked the man’s plague mask off his face too, and it’s skittered away to land near a buzzing refrigerator that looks like Kubrick’s monolith. “Sorry.”

He slips out of the kitchen and into a hallway. The house is a mess. The plumbing leaks in slushy, frozen-sludge droplets. The furniture is mostly destroyed. There are needles and broken syringes scattered here and there. Alcohol bottles. Cigarette butts. The whole shebang, and here Dean thought centuries-old Greek deities at least held onto a scrap of civilization.

Chirps. Nonhuman noises that Dean can’t make out. Somewhere, water sounds.

A sudden wave of nausea crashes through him, and Dean has to stop: can’t breathe, his throat chokes on that strange smell. He thinks he sees colors behind his eyes. He stops for a second with his hands on his knees, coughing it out, and then takes experimental sips of breaths that don’t seem to hurt him unless he breathes deep.

Shallow and quick, then.

He keeps going.

Around a staircase curving upstairs, the smell gets bad, and now it’s mixed also with the scent of bleach. Which, whiskey-tango-foxtrot, made it _worse._ The bleach is so strong that it sears into Dean’s nostrils, nearly blinds him to a demon in a mask rushing down at him, and Dean lets its own momentum drive itself into his knife. That surprises it but doesn’t kill it, and Dean heaves it across the rails and onto the floor below. Then he climbs the rest of the way to the top floor.

Still freezing. Still smelly.

Possessed by some strange predetermination, Dean follows the smell.

 The door at the end of the landing leads to a high-ceilinged room, within which is another door, with a tiny window in it. A man stands in front of it, dressed in a suit. He turns at Dean’s footsteps, and if he’s surprised at the sight of Dean, he doesn’t let on.

“Are you him?”

“Him _who?”_ The man’s voice is beautiful, his speech melismatic. “And you’re trespassing in my house.”

“Orpheus. Are you him?”

A rapid flash of eye contact. Dean’s not sure what this guy looks like, other than the fact that he’s rocking the whole Russian _vor_ look. Inexplicable, maybe. Wan. Nothing phenomenally Greek about him. It’s kind of hard to concentrate.

Dean really just hopes this isn’t one of the monsters that fall on an undefined Pantone space between black and white silos.

His vision swims. It must be the smell.

“We got out of there, but she came back wrong,” the man says. The smell is so strong in this room that Dean’s eyes water, and now something about it is very… _Hell_. Sulfur and grime and rot, the stench of death and blood and decay. “And the King of Hell, he’s looking for souls.”

“So you thought you’d get into a trade arrangement by playing the drug mafia. Wow, that’s smart.”

“We’re at a disadvantage. I don’t know who you are.”

It takes Dean a few seconds to process. “Somebody you pissed off.”

“Oh,” says Orpheus. He’s starting to sound far away. “I do hope you’re feeling fine, then. I wouldn’t want you to be angrier than you are.”

 _What did that mean?_ Dean’s fingers find his gun, but he doesn’t draw it out because all of his thoughts are soft, formless like cotton. He feels like something just darted past the corner of his eye but when he turns, it’s just one of those plague-masked demons. It’s walking at a normal speed, coming to stand by Orpheus, but it looks…funny. Its movements are strange.

Or maybe he’s not seeing things right.

Is something in the air? Dean’s sweating. He’s also feeling cold, a chill in his bones that stands all his hairs on end. There are lights in front of his eyes like shooting stars, a visual hallucination, and its buzzing auditory counterpart fills his ears. It’s dizzying. He never really wondered why the cronies all wore the masks. Was there, maybe, an _actual_ plague in the air? That would suck. If the entire area is contaminated and he’s right in the red zone that would…really suck.

“You have Hell on you,” Orpheus tells Dean, “I can see it. But it’s the newer Hell. When I was there, there were lesser levels. We had to fight it out of there. You think you had it bad, coming back whole, not broken…”

“Oh God,” rasps Dean. He’s losing the fight here; he can’t even stand up anymore. “Can we please not compare Hell experiences? Because I’ve heard that’s a conversational _faux pas_ ,at least where I come from.”

“It was all a tower.  A very cold, very tall tower. And you would be lost in it, on its floors, and you wouldn’t want to go in the basement because you know that’s where the worst is. But soul rot—that’s going to happen to you at any floor.  I don’t know why, your partner seemed more receptive to this theory.”

  _Partner,_ thinks Dean, and then, _Sam._

Before he can ask, there’s an electric crackle and a burning, and the hands of darkness that reach out to drag him down smells like singed hair, and maybe, under that, cigars and blood and ice-cream.

*

Sometimes if it follows after a particularly bad hunt where something supernatural chucked him into a wall or some other hard surface and gave him a concussion, and narrowing the set _still,_ if it turned out that Sam, somehow, had been entirely unaffected, then there’s a weird phenomenon that occurs. Sam will be driving, and Dean will lose time in fistfuls of minutes at a time, merciful chunks of oblivion before Sam’s fingers dig into his shoulders and shake him awake.

Dean will look outside the Impala, watching the scenery flash by, each frame of it a different little strip in a grim comic book, and those few seconds of scenic impressions would get stuck in his head like a photo. There’s a park with a bright red roundabout that they passed once, somewhere close to Wichita, and near the Narragansett Bay, a house with five boats on its roof.

Dean remembers these things in snapshots.

Here’s a scene: an empty cell. Wet. Maybe made of limestone. Dean sits up and where he touches the ground, his fingers come away dirty white.

But wait—it’s not actually empty. There’s a thing with red eyes and that strange thick Hell smell wafting off it. It seems weak, mewling, a mess that Orpheus dragged out with him. It crushes Dean’s heart with pity, which surprises him.

It bleeds, but it bleeds crystals. Red crystals. It’s been in the cold too long, and now it bleeds crystals. It bleeds Journey Red, the thing that’ll win it freedom from torment:  if only, if only.

Not demon blood then; this thing’s toxic blood. This thing that knows Orpheus’s music better than anyone, and Orpheus spinning a web of souls to save it using the same music.

 _Not its fault,_ he thinks fuzzily, _it was in a cage._ And then he’s sure he’s confusing it with something way more important, and panics.

Did Dean—

(— Dean got him out, right?)

It’s trying to lunge at Dean but it can’t, because someone drew a Devil’s Trap around it. With blood.

He knows who that is.

“I…really _don’t_ like this new trick of yours,” Dean mumbles at Sam. Tries to scramble to his feet and falls down again, and fuck it, now he can’t even breathe. Sam’s eyes are flashing. That’s a frame too, that’s a scene: Dean’s got to document that. Trick of the light or something more: it seems, in this city that’s a harsh cauldron, a better Sam is the one that doesn’t feel. That doesn’t empathize.

There’s something very un-Sam about him, and Dean can’t tell why he thinks that. Maybe because he’s being so methodical. He’s deep shadow and grim man in Dean’s faltering vision. He acts like one possessed. There’s blood on his lips. His own, from the Devil’s Trap. Dean almost pushes him away when he kneels nearby, but then Sam’s dragging at his jacket, saying _fuck fuck fuck,_ and his funny flashing eyes are scared, and Dean knows it’s his Sam, even if there’s a certain flatness to his gaze that doesn’t compute.

The thing lunges again, and this time, the cell shakes, dust rains, a crack appears.

Sam raises his hand and the thing gets tossed backwards, mewling as it goes.    

“Dean,” says Sam, “Don’t worry.”

But _he_ sounds worried. And maybe he’s not worried that he’ll fail somehow or get them both killed; he’s only worried about _this_ —everything that ever put a real wedge between them on repeat. Everything that they never talked about, that got pushed down under Sam’s death and return and re-return. Everything under the carpet that maybe, maybe Sam _didn’t_ want to shove down there.

Sam mutters something and the Devil’s Trap glows, and Dean’s not going to ask him _what,_ because for a moment he thinks he understands the harsh, swiveling consonants of the language and there is only one place where Sam could have picked it up. One place that’s locked up somewhere inside of his mind; a dam more than a wall, but cracking now under the pressure of a loose sluice gate somewhere. He thinks of how Sam never really had a chance, not with this case.

Dean thinks of how Sam is here right now, giving himself that chance.

Then the weirdest thing happens: the thing starts talking to Sam. In the same language. And Sam’s replying. Another snapshot for Dean, to add to his repertoire of weird things that happen when he hasn’t the foggiest.

He’s coughing. His lungs seem to be clogging up.

“Sammy—?” he says, still unsure. “Is that thing infectious?”

Sam sounds staggered when he replies. “It wants to die.”

“What,” whispers Dean, cadence-less.

“It doesn’t want to be patched-up, it wants to die. It’s had enough. Done enough.”

Dean coughs into his hand. Rolls around and staggers halfway up before he crashes again. On the next try, he manages it. He’s unsteady. He’s never been this out of it in the thick of finishing up a case, never been so entirely useless.

“Shit.”

Sam’s still waiting. Dean pushes at his hand that holds Ruby’s knife, trying to get him to move. _What are you waiting for?_ But Sam’s thinking. Weighing.

The cell door crashes open. Dean sees a blur of something in colors that don’t resolve in his foggy brain. Hears words that don’t make sense; and makes a quick grab of Ruby’s knife. It comes easy with Sam distracted, and the moment he sees the muzzle of a gun, he lunges forward. The momentum carries him across the Devil’s Trap and sinks the knife in the thing’s heart. It _looks_ fine, Dean thinks for a moment: it looks like a woman. It’s just that the soul can no longer occupy this vessel, as if the vessel’s full of holes. The woman’s red eyes swivel to meet his gaze.

It’s blood—congealed red liquid only in its heart—splashes in his face.

He hears Sam shout. And then everything goes grey.

*

Dean’s in a room with a couch and a flickering TV playing _North by Northwest,_ and there’s ash everywhere. It hangs suspended in the air, gets inside his lungs, and corrodes his eyes. He’s trying to watch Cary Grant but his eyes keep dribbling out and Sam’s next to him on the couch humming this tune that he says he remembers vaguely from somewhere. It’s not even really humming more than it is reciting, and it sounds something like a voicemail.

Sam says, “The tower really _was_ very cold. It got colder the lower you went, and I was in the coldest part of cold-town, man. Freezing. Literally.”

Outside, there are shadows of broken buildings like 2D cutouts. Ash keeps falling. It presses up against the windows, and there are disgusting clumps of it on his hand when he stops coughing. The house is dirty and ashy but a _house:_ there are musical instruments in a corner and a wall full of writing in another. The wall says: _don’t save me._ Multiple times.

Dean hums _Stairway to Heaven_ and then stops himself, purses his lips.

He’s somewhere else, in a Hell that he knows.

It’s not cold in his Hell, not usually, and there never are very many churches. Not very many butterflies even, but Hell has been acting up, parameters changing like a temperamental program with lines of code missing, and now Dean watches as they alight on the dirty glass cupolas far above his head, a high-flying xerophytic butterfly, red-veined and black-winged, shattering like glass whenever Alistair notices one and frowns at it.

“I thought I wasn’t here anymore,” he says in a whisper, and the soul next to him shudders, says nothing. Its heart beats a slow and swimmy pulse at its wrist, like a memory of life still not faded, and the movement of Dean’s needle keeps time with it. The inside of the church is dark, cold the kind that leaves ice on your eyelashes. His voice is a rustle when he speaks again. “I don’t really want to talk about it, though. Or even think about it. Tell me a story.”

This one knows a lot of stories. Between shrieks and spells of quiet when Dean is too bored with all of this to do anything, it’s been telling him about samurais that burst out of ripe golden peaches, and nine-tailed fox-women with paws that became legs only for a man beautiful enough.  There’s one that Dean particularly likes, one that the soul tells him now, about a king and a corpse, and the stories that the corpse tells the king to con him into letting it go.

“Why does the king want the corpse, anyway?”

But the soul doesn’t know the answer to that. _Old story,_ it says. _Older than history._ _Folklore runs on a fool’s engine._ Dean shrugs. Must’ve been a pretty fucked up king, he thinks, if he was carting around talking corpses for no particular reason.

The ground shakes, and Dean watches a crack snakes its way down a stone wall.

“What’s going _on?_ ” the soul says.

“They don’t generally, you know,” Dean says, hurriedly, talking out of his mouth. His eyes skim over the pews and linger on the altar, where Alistair leans over a soul with bones black as burnt sugar. His smile flickers as he turns his head, teeth wet and white, and Dean looks away. “Talk. At all, really. Corpses, I mean. Unless they’re zombies. Ugh, even if they’re zombies, I don’t know if they _talk_. Did a case once, I think—though I don’t really remember…”

There’s grime mixed with the blood that each movement of the needle smears on the soul’s arm, grime that Dean’s picked up from all over Hell, and he feels an uncharacteristic need to apologize. Maybe offer it a strip of cloth, or explain that he can’t really help it. He’s just a guy. This is what happens to guys who work in Hell.

The grime is surface-level at first, something of a consistency stranded between licorice and coal-dust, but it sinks through skin the longer you stay, sluicing past fat and muscle and deep into bone. Stay long enough, and your heart can turn black as a miner’s hands, all your love gone as tarred as a chain-smoker’s lungs. Somewhere in the process is a threshold, a point of critical mass, beyond which you become more than a single name or a soul—and one of Hell’s own. Kind of like milk souring when you shake it out with lemon juice, which is a stupid analogy, but what the fuck. Dean has it all figured out. The way demons are made is an art as precise as a Japanese tea ceremony, and it’s not a process you can accelerate. Dean’s still a few hundred souls-on-the-racks short, but he’s getting there.

 “We’re waiting in a church,” Dean says, sere and terse, like a prayer. “We don’t know what we’re waiting for.”

“It’s been d-d- _days_ ,” whines the soul, and Dean wants to scoff at it, because it’s new, he hasn’t even broken it yet, and what concept does it have of time in Hell? This guy Dante, who Sam read once, had this whole theory of Hell’s geography. Dean remembers the picture in Sammy’s book. He’d thought it looked rather like an ice-cream cone, the Cornetto type with layers. But even Dante had nothing to say about _time_ in Hell, or the shape of it. Time in Hell didn’t flow as much as curve, or twist, or fold itself into the shape of a goddamn pretzel. Time here is timid, toothless; unable to hold its own. It can stop like a crank-shaft waterpump or run backward like a pocketwatch, and who knows how many years it has been up on the surface? There’s no precise formula. Only conjecture.

“It hasn’t been _days,_ ” Dean sneers. “It’s just been—a very long time.”

He pulls the needle tight, and the soul hisses, then wails. Up there by the altar, the soul Alistair is playing with has ribs black like treble scales, a belly red as Turkish delight.  

Dean swallows. “A _really_ long time,” he says, and looks up at the stone ceiling, the stained glass windows past which hellfire burns. His eyes flit over the portion of the church wall that has been developing cracks. The cracks seem to worry Alistair, though Dean doesn’t know why and he doesn’t exactly care much. He thinks everything is pretty much broken in Hell as it is. But then, even as he watches, the ground shakes again, and bits of plaster and cement drizzle from the ceiling.

Alistair hisses in displeasure but then grins his demoniac grin at Dean.

“Tell me the one where they churn an ocean,” Dean tells the soul, and as it starts speaking, he tries to focus, to follow the thread of its voice that spins a tale about gods and demons older than time, but his thoughts swirl. There’s heaven’s light coming through the roof of the church.

He’s not in Hell anymore.

He sees his brother. Sam’s saying _Dean-Dean-Dean_. He looks like shit. He looks exhausted, and his hair is a mess. He’s fading right in front of Dean, bit by bit, looking more tired by the second.

They’re rocking. They’re in a train. It’s insanely bright. There are normal people around them, and Sam’s shivering, Sam’s all bloody.

Dean pushes at him, weakly.

“—get off.”

“We can’t—we can’t get off—”

Sam’s burning. Sam’s a furnace, Sam’s eyes are weird, Sam speaks Enochian like English and is so messed up that he’s making super extra effort to hold himself together. That’s bad; he should be allowed to break apart sometimes. Or not, because he might just throw himself off a rooftop.

“I didn’t. I wasn’t going to, I was just…I _didn’t_.”

Dean grabs hold of Sam’s sleeve. Pushes him away. Finds him again. “I know, I know, shut up.”

( _a_ _dark highway; Sam’s holding a phone and Dean’s saying terrible things through it, terrible, terrible things)_

And Dean’s sick.

Scratch that: wants to _be_ sick.

Dean paws at him. “Jesus, Sam, off this train, off this—”

“Okay, okay. Okay, Dean, look, we’re getting off. There’s a station. Come on.”

They’re on a station. Dean flounders around long enough on his feet for him to find a bin to throw up into, and then he sits on the ground trying to breathe. Sam rubs little circles on his back, his gaze far-away, a smudge of red on his chin like a war adornment. Sam’s bloody. Dean’s bloody. People keep looking at them but don’t offer help. Fucking amazing bullshit world.

This is probably real, then.

There’s this really terrible noise inside his head. He wants to jump in front of the train to stop it, please just _stop it,_ but then on second thoughts it might just be music. Loud, normal music.  Some Korean pop thing on the station’s TV, twenty-somethings jumping around in tiny anime school-girl outfits.

Sam interlocks his arm with Dean’s and pulls him to his feet. He grimaces, apologetically.

The next thing, they’re in a washroom.

“You got her blood in your eyes, in your mouth, and you— _freaked_ out. I don’t even know what,” Sam explains from the other side of a wet-cloth that he’s rubbing against Dean’s face. Sam sorta needs it too, thinks Dean, vaguely. He has a feeling he keeps trying to offer the thing back to Sam, but his thoughts are jumping orbits. “I think, I think if they’ve been souls in Hell since the beginning of time, they become…like special extra toxic demons. I’m—I’m sorry, I couldn’t find the car. And the van I stole ran out of gas, Dean, I’m sorry. I just—thought we should get to a safe place.”

Dean gives him a thumbs-up. He can feel himself puddling on the floor. “Yeah. Cool, okay. Yeah.”

“We’ll get the car in a while.”

“That’s—okay, Sammy.” He pats Sam’s arm. Then he throws up again.

He’s not so sure about the journey back. Out through grimy windows he sees flashes of city, black ribbon undulating with features. They stumble into a street with an abundance of cheerful black alphanumerics written on yellow rooftops, into a Jamaican driver’s backseat with Sam effortlessly cooking up some story to go with their appearance and the fact that they probably look like drug dealers who’d had a bad trade day. And then they’re moving through the streets and Dean thinks he falls asleep, watching the darkness outside, a speck in a black river in a sea of other specks.

*

Dean wakes up in the near dark to find himself in the apartment they share. It’s light. Could be afternoon or morning or early evening. He has no concept of time. He thinks Sam’s asleep, but then Sam blinks and sits up and says, “Hey.”

Note to self: don’t let Sam clean you up without doing the same favor to himself. To be stuck on a virtual Post-It and pasted on a brain lobe until the next time—because the effect is that of looking at a zombie that’s just crawled through volcanic ash.  

“Dude,” groans Dean, “what even happened?”

A shrug like, _oh, that’s every day._ “You iced Eurydice. Or whatever it was. I sent that dude through a wall, got Ruby’s knife, and got rid of him. The other demons ran. Back to Crowley, I’m guessing, since this soul-collecting operation’s now done.”

“No more music?”

“No. Oh, and you fainted a couple of times.”

“I did not _faint,_ ” Dean says, viciously. He kicks at Sam’s leg. “What the fuck did you disappear on me for?”

Sam shakes his head.

“I don’t speak Headshake. Gee, Sam, at least give me a chance to be judgmental.”

Sam grunts illegibly. Dean kicks him again.

“Still got mojo?”

Sam’s pillow flies into the air and whips Dean in the face. But it’s weak. “Fading,” says Sam. “I know you went to the morgue after that demon that jumped me in the alley. After you left to find your porn-star.”

Dean looks at him. “But I know you didn’t.”

“You do.” Sam asks, gravely. “But it was a possibility?”

“Of course. But you wouldn’t. I know that.”

Sam’s not looking at him. Sam’s looking everywhere but at him, and his voice is growing fainter as he speaks. “It was just…it was exactly like back then. The same shakes. The same power. You know? I think it was because this monster had demon blood ten times stronger than normal. But it still felt…same, like being on it again. Felt _same._ ”

Dean shrugs. “You’re different.”

“And they weren’t even fundamentally bad,” Sam changes the topic. Dean kicks him again, and Sam continues to ignore him. “I mean—it’s all an act of love. It was just…Hell. Hell fucked hard with them. In their position, you or I—”

“—wouldn’t have killed other people. There’s a time and place to empathize, Sammy. Can Hell do that to a soul, though? Mess it up so badly?”

Sam rolls his eyes. “It’s on a relative scale, Dean. I have a fucking wall inside my head. You had an angel.”

“I’d like to think that my blood isn’t magical, though, thank you,” Dean shudders.

“It didn’t even want my soul. Wouldn’t have taken yours, either.”

Dean makes a face. “That’s…not comforting. That’s like being told we’re roadkill on a plate that no one wants to eat.”

Sam laughs shortly. “Yeah,” he says, eyeing the ground near his feet. “What now?”

“We go get the car, and then give Jameson a chicken dinner and undying gratitude. Or at least, will-never-bother-you-again-itude. See? Sometimes I meet helpful people.”

“Does _Kristil_ even eat chicken? I think they’re mostly vegan, to preserve shape.”

“Stop being snide.” Dean mutters. “But, really, Sammy. What were you thinking, going in there alone? Just—one straight answer.”  

Sam looks right at him, this time, no bullshit. “I just wanted to stop it. This whole case. So I was downstairs last year, and I don’t remember all of it, but you and I can’t keep being scared I will, we can’t keep hiding under the bed for a bogeyman that might not come. I mean, Hell is not this creaky joint between point A and point B for me, Dean, it’s something that’s changed me. And not being in control, that fucking music—I couldn’t stand it, Dean. We found—” the lines around Sam’s mouth harden a little. “—we’re bigger than that, now. I am. I didn’t want us to regress. We’ve done too much to go back to any of that, to make the same mistakes.” He goes rigid. “I heard some awful things in that music. But that’s not you, not now. I just wanted to do something as long as I remembered that. And I didn’t want to be another problem, a bloodsucking freak again, I didn’t—”

Dean has no idea what Sam’s talking about.

“Whoa.”                                                                                                                                               

“You asked for it. I would—I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Yeah?”

Sam, surer: “Yeah.”

“Sam?” Dean looks at him.

 “I’m fine.”

“Fine’s not always…”

“ _Dean._ ”

Dean lets out a breath. He has more questions. He looks out the window, and the building opposite them reflects light: a blear of it, a low flying cloud scattering sunshine perhaps. The entire sky is grey, but there’s this crest of light, wrapping around the sills of their window, climbing in and across the floor.  

It’s unnaturally bright, picking up the arch of Sam’s foot, a hillock created by Sam’s messily folded blanket. Dean follows its path and loses track, forgets his questions. When it clambers over Dean, it’s netted from coming through a mosquito filter attached on the window. The filter’s the dirtiest thing, but the light is just blinding.

“So? Does _Kristil_ have a pet cactus?”

“Shut up, Sam.”

He has to move. Sam has to move too, because he looks exhausted, white dirt and blood on him and bags around his eyes. He looks like he needs solid ten hours of sleep and good food, and a whole lot of doing nothing but sitting around in this world while the sun shines, peaceably. Or better still, stay shotgun while they drive out of this city and to some place where they can see the stars better.

But for now, wrapped in this precarious light, they just sit.

 


End file.
